I don't know that "but they're just like the Catholic Church in the middle ages, so they must be an acceptable form of religion worthy of tax-exempt status" is really a good argument, if that's what you're going for. Remember that we (in the historical sense of my ancestors) responded to corruption in the Catholic church largely by leaving and then setting its remaining followers on fire and shooting them, in varying orders. I don't think the midaeval form of Catholocism would get any better a popular reception than Scientology... probably worse, honestly.
Possibly because murder is, largely, really fricking hard to get away with, so no matter how encouraged you are, there are other deterrents in place; meanwhile, most rapes aren't even reported, so if you're feeling convinced by that movie or whatever, there's not exactly a sword of Damocles hanging around to hold you back.
It's similar to the rationale for regulating sexually explicit content to a higher age in movies, I imagine: it's really obvious that you shouldn't murder people left and right so it's not really a big concern if kids see it on screen, but on the off-chance that there's a teenager that isn't already thinking about sex, and seeing it in a movie convinces him otherwise, the obvious fact that it's a private thing that you're not likely to get called out on is probably going to occur to him.
Admittedly I'm not a fan of any censorship, and got an annoyingly extensive sexual education at an embarassingly young age with no real side-effects, so I may not be reproducing the arguments perfectly. But, anyhow, it's not just craziness, there is a sort of method to the madness of the rating systems.
No, no, you let your kid watch that and next thing you know he'll be breaking three bones in the scrim and then knocking off for a pint or twelve with the boys in some dive in south London.
There are smaller bits of originality in there, as well:
Warhammer online added new class archetypes to the standard bevy (the most entertaining being the defensive rdps) and some new stuff as far as group synergy goes.
Aion's shaping up to be oriented around 3-d tactics to a much greater degree than any previous game, flight sims aside (it's live in asia... don't judge me! *sob*).
Guild wars' scenario-by-scenario ability selection makes it fairly unique as a game, and the payment system is sane, which is cool.
Star Wars Galaxies... yeah, OK, you win on that one.
Anyhow, there's a reason that, while there are a lot of MMOs, not that many are all that successful. There has to be something to draw people in, and an established IP goes a long way toward getting you to the point at which you can rely on word of mouth (assuming the game doesn't suck). Plenty of games are original, it's just that often that originality is poorly or shallowly implemented. That's not even restricted to MMOs.
To be fair, not all or even most of the suppression of the Apocrypha was active and intentional. Most of it was simply that they'd been judged to not fit in with the religion the council was building, for whatever reason (probable forgery, ill-regarded author, or simple lack of a discernible moral lesson), and that most of the preservation of literature was done by the church. There wasn't so much an organized hunting down of the things (though occasionally a pope or bishop or something would take it upon themselves to go a zealot on us) as a general apathy among the people maintaining the libraries. If you were a monk, would you spend a year of your time copying a decaying tome whose contents your society had deemed worthless, when there were thousands of competing volumes of actual worth that needed copying to avoid being lost to the ages? Me neither. I mean, copying a single book was sometimes a monk's entire life's work, that's a big investment.
So lighten up, it wasn't ill-intentioned. And most of the apocrypha are either crazy or pointless (in my own estimation as well as the church's), so meh anyway. Hell, I dunno how most of revelations didn't get thrown out as well, it's pretty whack too.
(Side note: would have been nice if more monks had thought books of math and engineering were worth the effort, all we got was the half-assed job the muslim translators did of preservation. Better than the complete absence of the technical books in europe, but still. Anyhow, if you're going to be mad at the church for losing books, be mad at them for those, not the useless apocrypha bullshit.)
Blu-ray isn't backwards-compatible in the sense that you can pop one of the discs into an old player, but no mew media format is like that, reprogrammable (PC) stuff aside.
It is, however, backwards-compatible to a greater extent than, say, DVD, as you can take a bit of media from the last generation (a standard DVD) and pop it into a Blu-Ray player and it'll work fine. Trust me, trying to stuff a VHS tape into a dvd slot is a pain by comparison.
Anyhow, I think that people buying new playback hardware are buying blu-ray (because why not? it still plays DVD), there's just no rush to upgrade their existing libraries or their working players. Speed of replacement is slower than speed of "shiny new thing", but it'll take over eventually.
There's some fairly elegant* predicative stuff with the inertial sensors going on as well, iirc. On the order of the double-click timer, but with more sensor ball thingies involved in the data collection.
*I assume it's elegant, since this is like the 4000th time they've refined the general 'tracking' idea but only the second or third version they've put on the market.
... I've been seriously freaked out a few times by Vista anticipating what I wanted done and popping up with a dialogue box offering to do it automatically.
I don't have quite the faith to actually let it do it yet, but that's the same impulse that has me driving a manual, i.e. it's not rational. If windows is planning to impress me, I think developing psychic powers is a good way to go about it.
(For reference, I use Ubuntu for tooling around on the internet at home, Vista for gaming, XP on my office machine so the department tech won't hate me, and 95 on my equipment machinery because of god knows what compatibility issues with the X-ray control software.)
(Side note - Never try to get 95 to support USB, no matter how modern the hardware is and how much you hate juggling floppy disks full of plain-text data. It's not worth the emotional anguish.)
I think you're not giving enough credit to the materials science aspect of electrical engineering. Control engineering, which is probably the most important coding-based application of EE industrially, requires a fairly thorough knowledge of not only the processes you're trying to automate, but the behavior of the control hardware itself. Plus if you can turn it into a hardware control cheaply, you save your company a lot of money and boost the reliability considerably. And, academically, you really need to be familiar with the hardware to properly optimize your simulation code.
Just saying that those courses are in there because they're an important part of electrical engineering, not because they felt like tossing some extra crap in for accreditation. Sure, you can do nothing but be a non-calculation-intensive code-monkey with an EE degree, but only in the same sense that I have the option to make really good pizzas for a living with my ChE degree.
It's a good emotional shorthand for dealing with the universe, plus a general exercise of some of the capabilities that humans have found useful during our history.
Or, putting it another way, anthropomorphizing natural forces lets us blow off steam and bounce ideas in a manner that would normally require another cooperative person of comparable intelligence were we behaving in a manner that was strictly rational. And it sort of stretches our brain's capacity to comprehend things that don't actually exist -- as that's the same general thing that's given us all our technology and a lot of our social and philosophical ideas and ideals, I'm not really gonna complain when it decides to go out for a walk and conjure up some lightning-slinging bearded guys.
I've kind of fallen out of any specific modern religion due to a combination of apathy and not liking how seriously most of the other guys take it, but I don't intend to depart entirely from a useful and entertaining form of literature any more than I intend to stop playing with paper airplanes during boring seminars. You should give believing in a God or two a try, it's handy. And even if it doesn't work out for you, it's not like you can't stop anytime you want.
I dunno, my reaction was "Wether they're vulnerable or not, if they haven't actually been infected or hacked, then it's not a false but a legitimate sense of security". Thinking nothing is probably going to happen is not the same thing as thinking nothing can happen.
that they aren't. They're going there to be entertained, and both (a) laughing at the stupid things stupid people say and (b) works of complete fabrication are both far more entertaining on average than scientific documents. For example, I watch loads of the "the lizard men are among us" videos because they are hilarious and so retarded that they border on self-satire, that's (a) for you, and I enjoyed the "yarr! I can set water on fire!" videos even though it's obvious that it's just cut with ethanol, because it's (b).
What if you modify hardware and software for a living, but don't really give a damn with your personal gadgets unless they're actually underperforming, broken, or poorly optimized? What does that make you?
Oh, right, an engineer.
Not bagging your position here, because while it's one that I don't agree with I can see how, having not had personal experience with the vast majority of historical presidents and being presented with the continual illusion that the office of the presidency is solely responsible for not only foreign but domestic policy, you might land at that conclusion.
My puzzlement stems from the "insightful" rating. I mean, really, this is a fairly widely held opinion and probably will be until the new guy starts screwing things up, just like with Clinton. And it's not exactly gleaned from a gaze which penetrates into the obscure complexities of politics and emerges triumphant bearing a gleaming truth which sloughs off years of misconceptions in the minds of the onlookers. And, finally, valid as generic expression of outrage and 'my political opponent eats babies' may be to the grandfather comment, it doesn't really have anything to do with anything in the more general sense, especially in context of this thread.
In short, I'm slowly being convinced that the "mods on crack" cliche is less an amusing hyperbole and more a literal truth.
(If this comment gets modded up it will be just as silly, by the way.)
Maybe I'm being anal here, but it's actually a $.35 mistake, because you will get the letter back stamped for insufficient postage, and will have to put a new stamp on another envelope to resend it. In fact, $.35 plus the cost of an envelope. So not as bad as you make it out to be.
The problem with controversial subjects is that unless it's _currently_ controversial, then only the people with vested interest in the subject are going to be editing it. This sometimes means that only one side is left.
My favorite example were the articles on freemasonry; there was an intense defensive tone and a lot of sweeping generalizations about how awesome the temples were and how every member was a paragon of moral humanity. While I hope it's been tuned down a bit since then, I'm always on the lookout for similar but subtler efects taht might trip me up.
Once no one in the public sphere cares about teaching creationism in schools(hopefully after the courts tell the creationists to screw off), I bet some history pages regarding the various associated trials and such get interesting.
A screw is an inclined plane mapped onto a cylinder. The shape of a screw is derivative of that of a nail. You're still dependent on prior inventions to get anything done.
The patent holding company and associated legal antics are as old as the system itself, and not at all restricted to computer software in the way you describe. The only differences between software IP and physical IP that I see is that people are a bit more polite about it (on both sides) in the physical-widget based industries, and the growth of "you have to defend your trademark or you lose it" enforcements have made companies a bit more paranoid about IP when IP is the majority of their product. If you lose the patent on your screw, you still have a plant making a bunch of screws that you can sell. Lose it on an algorithm, and you suddenly have nothing.
I'm sympathetic to the economic plight there, but I think that perhaps allowing information sciences to become a separate industry by allowing patents on algorithms (though I seem to recall that they call it something else to prevent the patents being struck down) was a mistake in the first place. Sure, it made the field develop faster initially, but it's reached the point where it has started slowing it down instead.
Actually, they swear the oath of office on a religious text associated with their known religious affiliation.
If you're Muslim, the standard is the Qu'ran. I'm unsure what the standard choice is for others, but I know that court-rooms, at least, keep a stock of a variety of religious texts (depending on the demographic makeup of the district and how well funded the court is), and will generally request that you supply your own text or item for swearing if you're of a faith they've not accounted for. I imagine the process for elected officials is similar.
No, I don't know what the procedure is for atheists, but I've seen courts dispense with the religious item requirement entirely (in a couple of civil cases, not sure wether that's because they weren't criminal trials or if it's just judge's discretion).
The state recognizes religion in general officially, and accounts for it as normal human behavior. Specific religions, that's up to the states and the various local governments, and even there the limitations are fairly stringent. There's some crossover in policy because a lot of secular ethics were developed by philosophers for religious applications or adopted in parallel by the churches, which are always on the lookout for new ideas of justice and behavior management. But that doesn't necessarily equate to religious dominance.
"In god we trust" is primarily on there as part of the bazillion symbols we put on our money to make it harder to copy. Hell, there're freemason symbols on there, too, and no one (sane) complains about freemason dominance of the government. "Under god" in the pledge of allegiance was added early last century and upheld by a supreme court which was at least the spiritual kin of the one that thought ruling on wether a tomato was a fruit or a vegetable was an appropriate thing for them to arbitrate... so I can't really argue that that one's stupid. At least the god picked is the one identified with by the vast majority of americans who follow the religions of Abraham, though. So it's democratic, if not sensible.
Any of my professors would have beaten me to the edge of death for screwing the magnitude of my design tolerances to that extent, and these were the purely theoretical courses. Ironically, the shop guys would just shrug and truncate your number to what they could do when you made requests from them.
But on another note, a lot of older design software uses a fixed-point interface or whatever it's called nowadays, where it sets all numbers to 4 decimal places wether you like it or not. So you learn to look at a number like "3.5000000000000 inches" and just know it means 3 + 1/2" +/-.01", because the point of being an engineer is knowing how exact a project needs to be intuitively.
Just kidding, it's probably one of the reasons the UK still plays second fiddle to the USA economically. Viscerally satisfying to have the more annoying slow people knocked out of the Uni system early by the proficiency tests, though, I bet.
Not to be too much of a literalist, but if you turn a lipid bilayer inside out you have exactly the same thing. Maybe something like "reduces the surface tension required for the membrane to maintain its carefully-regulated shape" would be better. Puts it in terms of energy physics too, making your argument more consistent.
Never understood the point of "antibacterial soap" given that most soaps are some kind of hydrophillic group on a hydrophobic chain, and will thus bust bacterial membranes like nobody's business anyway.
My assumption was that it was some sort of marketing thing, like that birth control pill that advertised that it reduced acne (talking to some friends in the field, it's apparently common knowledge that they all do this, but only one company did the relevant clinical trial legwork so nobody else got to use it as an advertising point). Honestly, it's news to me that an actual drug was added to the soap mix to make it more "antibacterial" at all.
Regarding (5), I'm also curious what it is about the drug that actually causes mutation instead of simply bringing them out with selection pressure like normal antibiotics. Could just be poor translation from reviewed article -> dumb people article, but could be something cool, too.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know that "but they're just like the Catholic Church in the middle ages, so they must be an acceptable form of religion worthy of tax-exempt status" is really a good argument, if that's what you're going for. Remember that we (in the historical sense of my ancestors) responded to corruption in the Catholic church largely by leaving and then setting its remaining followers on fire and shooting them, in varying orders. I don't think the midaeval form of Catholocism would get any better a popular reception than Scientology... probably worse, honestly.
Possibly because murder is, largely, really fricking hard to get away with, so no matter how encouraged you are, there are other deterrents in place; meanwhile, most rapes aren't even reported, so if you're feeling convinced by that movie or whatever, there's not exactly a sword of Damocles hanging around to hold you back.
It's similar to the rationale for regulating sexually explicit content to a higher age in movies, I imagine: it's really obvious that you shouldn't murder people left and right so it's not really a big concern if kids see it on screen, but on the off-chance that there's a teenager that isn't already thinking about sex, and seeing it in a movie convinces him otherwise, the obvious fact that it's a private thing that you're not likely to get called out on is probably going to occur to him.
Admittedly I'm not a fan of any censorship, and got an annoyingly extensive sexual education at an embarassingly young age with no real side-effects, so I may not be reproducing the arguments perfectly. But, anyhow, it's not just craziness, there is a sort of method to the madness of the rating systems.
Football? You mean that horrible rugby simulator?
No, no, you let your kid watch that and next thing you know he'll be breaking three bones in the scrim and then knocking off for a pint or twelve with the boys in some dive in south London.
There are smaller bits of originality in there, as well: Warhammer online added new class archetypes to the standard bevy (the most entertaining being the defensive rdps) and some new stuff as far as group synergy goes. Aion's shaping up to be oriented around 3-d tactics to a much greater degree than any previous game, flight sims aside (it's live in asia... don't judge me! *sob*). Guild wars' scenario-by-scenario ability selection makes it fairly unique as a game, and the payment system is sane, which is cool. Star Wars Galaxies... yeah, OK, you win on that one. Anyhow, there's a reason that, while there are a lot of MMOs, not that many are all that successful. There has to be something to draw people in, and an established IP goes a long way toward getting you to the point at which you can rely on word of mouth (assuming the game doesn't suck). Plenty of games are original, it's just that often that originality is poorly or shallowly implemented. That's not even restricted to MMOs.
To be fair, not all or even most of the suppression of the Apocrypha was active and intentional. Most of it was simply that they'd been judged to not fit in with the religion the council was building, for whatever reason (probable forgery, ill-regarded author, or simple lack of a discernible moral lesson), and that most of the preservation of literature was done by the church. There wasn't so much an organized hunting down of the things (though occasionally a pope or bishop or something would take it upon themselves to go a zealot on us) as a general apathy among the people maintaining the libraries. If you were a monk, would you spend a year of your time copying a decaying tome whose contents your society had deemed worthless, when there were thousands of competing volumes of actual worth that needed copying to avoid being lost to the ages? Me neither. I mean, copying a single book was sometimes a monk's entire life's work, that's a big investment.
So lighten up, it wasn't ill-intentioned. And most of the apocrypha are either crazy or pointless (in my own estimation as well as the church's), so meh anyway. Hell, I dunno how most of revelations didn't get thrown out as well, it's pretty whack too.
(Side note: would have been nice if more monks had thought books of math and engineering were worth the effort, all we got was the half-assed job the muslim translators did of preservation. Better than the complete absence of the technical books in europe, but still. Anyhow, if you're going to be mad at the church for losing books, be mad at them for those, not the useless apocrypha bullshit.)
Blu-ray isn't backwards-compatible in the sense that you can pop one of the discs into an old player, but no mew media format is like that, reprogrammable (PC) stuff aside.
It is, however, backwards-compatible to a greater extent than, say, DVD, as you can take a bit of media from the last generation (a standard DVD) and pop it into a Blu-Ray player and it'll work fine. Trust me, trying to stuff a VHS tape into a dvd slot is a pain by comparison.
Anyhow, I think that people buying new playback hardware are buying blu-ray (because why not? it still plays DVD), there's just no rush to upgrade their existing libraries or their working players. Speed of replacement is slower than speed of "shiny new thing", but it'll take over eventually.
There's some fairly elegant* predicative stuff with the inertial sensors going on as well, iirc. On the order of the double-click timer, but with more sensor ball thingies involved in the data collection.
*I assume it's elegant, since this is like the 4000th time they've refined the general 'tracking' idea but only the second or third version they've put on the market.
... I've been seriously freaked out a few times by Vista anticipating what I wanted done and popping up with a dialogue box offering to do it automatically. I don't have quite the faith to actually let it do it yet, but that's the same impulse that has me driving a manual, i.e. it's not rational. If windows is planning to impress me, I think developing psychic powers is a good way to go about it.
(For reference, I use Ubuntu for tooling around on the internet at home, Vista for gaming, XP on my office machine so the department tech won't hate me, and 95 on my equipment machinery because of god knows what compatibility issues with the X-ray control software.)
(Side note - Never try to get 95 to support USB, no matter how modern the hardware is and how much you hate juggling floppy disks full of plain-text data. It's not worth the emotional anguish.)
I think you're not giving enough credit to the materials science aspect of electrical engineering. Control engineering, which is probably the most important coding-based application of EE industrially, requires a fairly thorough knowledge of not only the processes you're trying to automate, but the behavior of the control hardware itself. Plus if you can turn it into a hardware control cheaply, you save your company a lot of money and boost the reliability considerably. And, academically, you really need to be familiar with the hardware to properly optimize your simulation code.
Just saying that those courses are in there because they're an important part of electrical engineering, not because they felt like tossing some extra crap in for accreditation. Sure, you can do nothing but be a non-calculation-intensive code-monkey with an EE degree, but only in the same sense that I have the option to make really good pizzas for a living with my ChE degree.
It's a good emotional shorthand for dealing with the universe, plus a general exercise of some of the capabilities that humans have found useful during our history.
Or, putting it another way, anthropomorphizing natural forces lets us blow off steam and bounce ideas in a manner that would normally require another cooperative person of comparable intelligence were we behaving in a manner that was strictly rational. And it sort of stretches our brain's capacity to comprehend things that don't actually exist -- as that's the same general thing that's given us all our technology and a lot of our social and philosophical ideas and ideals, I'm not really gonna complain when it decides to go out for a walk and conjure up some lightning-slinging bearded guys.
I've kind of fallen out of any specific modern religion due to a combination of apathy and not liking how seriously most of the other guys take it, but I don't intend to depart entirely from a useful and entertaining form of literature any more than I intend to stop playing with paper airplanes during boring seminars. You should give believing in a God or two a try, it's handy. And even if it doesn't work out for you, it's not like you can't stop anytime you want.
I dunno, my reaction was "Wether they're vulnerable or not, if they haven't actually been infected or hacked, then it's not a false but a legitimate sense of security". Thinking nothing is probably going to happen is not the same thing as thinking nothing can happen.
that they aren't. They're going there to be entertained, and both
(a) laughing at the stupid things stupid people say and
(b) works of complete fabrication
are both far more entertaining on average than scientific documents. For example, I watch loads of the "the lizard men are among us" videos because they are hilarious and so retarded that they border on self-satire, that's (a) for you, and I enjoyed the "yarr! I can set water on fire!" videos even though it's obvious that it's just cut with ethanol, because it's (b).
What if you modify hardware and software for a living, but don't really give a damn with your personal gadgets unless they're actually underperforming, broken, or poorly optimized? What does that make you? Oh, right, an engineer.
Not bagging your position here, because while it's one that I don't agree with I can see how, having not had personal experience with the vast majority of historical presidents and being presented with the continual illusion that the office of the presidency is solely responsible for not only foreign but domestic policy, you might land at that conclusion. My puzzlement stems from the "insightful" rating. I mean, really, this is a fairly widely held opinion and probably will be until the new guy starts screwing things up, just like with Clinton. And it's not exactly gleaned from a gaze which penetrates into the obscure complexities of politics and emerges triumphant bearing a gleaming truth which sloughs off years of misconceptions in the minds of the onlookers. And, finally, valid as generic expression of outrage and 'my political opponent eats babies' may be to the grandfather comment, it doesn't really have anything to do with anything in the more general sense, especially in context of this thread. In short, I'm slowly being convinced that the "mods on crack" cliche is less an amusing hyperbole and more a literal truth. (If this comment gets modded up it will be just as silly, by the way.)
Maybe I'm being anal here, but it's actually a $.35 mistake, because you will get the letter back stamped for insufficient postage, and will have to put a new stamp on another envelope to resend it. In fact, $.35 plus the cost of an envelope. So not as bad as you make it out to be.
Er, maybe I'm missing something here, but wasn't this a civil judgement? And wouldn't that make it by definition not criminal?
The problem with controversial subjects is that unless it's _currently_ controversial, then only the people with vested interest in the subject are going to be editing it. This sometimes means that only one side is left.
My favorite example were the articles on freemasonry; there was an intense defensive tone and a lot of sweeping generalizations about how awesome the temples were and how every member was a paragon of moral humanity. While I hope it's been tuned down a bit since then, I'm always on the lookout for similar but subtler efects taht might trip me up.
Once no one in the public sphere cares about teaching creationism in schools(hopefully after the courts tell the creationists to screw off), I bet some history pages regarding the various associated trials and such get interesting.
A screw is an inclined plane mapped onto a cylinder. The shape of a screw is derivative of that of a nail. You're still dependent on prior inventions to get anything done. The patent holding company and associated legal antics are as old as the system itself, and not at all restricted to computer software in the way you describe. The only differences between software IP and physical IP that I see is that people are a bit more polite about it (on both sides) in the physical-widget based industries, and the growth of "you have to defend your trademark or you lose it" enforcements have made companies a bit more paranoid about IP when IP is the majority of their product. If you lose the patent on your screw, you still have a plant making a bunch of screws that you can sell. Lose it on an algorithm, and you suddenly have nothing. I'm sympathetic to the economic plight there, but I think that perhaps allowing information sciences to become a separate industry by allowing patents on algorithms (though I seem to recall that they call it something else to prevent the patents being struck down) was a mistake in the first place. Sure, it made the field develop faster initially, but it's reached the point where it has started slowing it down instead.
Actually, they swear the oath of office on a religious text associated with their known religious affiliation.
If you're Muslim, the standard is the Qu'ran. I'm unsure what the standard choice is for others, but I know that court-rooms, at least, keep a stock of a variety of religious texts (depending on the demographic makeup of the district and how well funded the court is), and will generally request that you supply your own text or item for swearing if you're of a faith they've not accounted for. I imagine the process for elected officials is similar.
No, I don't know what the procedure is for atheists, but I've seen courts dispense with the religious item requirement entirely (in a couple of civil cases, not sure wether that's because they weren't criminal trials or if it's just judge's discretion).
The state recognizes religion in general officially, and accounts for it as normal human behavior. Specific religions, that's up to the states and the various local governments, and even there the limitations are fairly stringent. There's some crossover in policy because a lot of secular ethics were developed by philosophers for religious applications or adopted in parallel by the churches, which are always on the lookout for new ideas of justice and behavior management. But that doesn't necessarily equate to religious dominance.
"In god we trust" is primarily on there as part of the bazillion symbols we put on our money to make it harder to copy. Hell, there're freemason symbols on there, too, and no one (sane) complains about freemason dominance of the government. "Under god" in the pledge of allegiance was added early last century and upheld by a supreme court which was at least the spiritual kin of the one that thought ruling on wether a tomato was a fruit or a vegetable was an appropriate thing for them to arbitrate... so I can't really argue that that one's stupid. At least the god picked is the one identified with by the vast majority of americans who follow the religions of Abraham, though. So it's democratic, if not sensible.
The last member of the executive branch whose party _wasn't_ accused of fixing the vote by the whiny losing party was named George.
Not Washington. George III of England.
Just sayin'. Most likely they're all fixed, or none of them are. I'm guessing both.
I got fisherman and mountain guide.
I became a Chemical Engineer.
Those tests need some quality checking.
Any of my professors would have beaten me to the edge of death for screwing the magnitude of my design tolerances to that extent, and these were the purely theoretical courses. Ironically, the shop guys would just shrug and truncate your number to what they could do when you made requests from them.
.01", because the point of being an engineer is knowing how exact a project needs to be intuitively.
But on another note, a lot of older design software uses a fixed-point interface or whatever it's called nowadays, where it sets all numbers to 4 decimal places wether you like it or not. So you learn to look at a number like "3.5000000000000 inches" and just know it means 3 + 1/2" +/-
Works in the UK.
Just kidding, it's probably one of the reasons the UK still plays second fiddle to the USA economically. Viscerally satisfying to have the more annoying slow people knocked out of the Uni system early by the proficiency tests, though, I bet.
Not to be too much of a literalist, but if you turn a lipid bilayer inside out you have exactly the same thing. Maybe something like "reduces the surface tension required for the membrane to maintain its carefully-regulated shape" would be better. Puts it in terms of energy physics too, making your argument more consistent.
Never understood the point of "antibacterial soap" given that most soaps are some kind of hydrophillic group on a hydrophobic chain, and will thus bust bacterial membranes like nobody's business anyway.
My assumption was that it was some sort of marketing thing, like that birth control pill that advertised that it reduced acne (talking to some friends in the field, it's apparently common knowledge that they all do this, but only one company did the relevant clinical trial legwork so nobody else got to use it as an advertising point). Honestly, it's news to me that an actual drug was added to the soap mix to make it more "antibacterial" at all.
Regarding (5), I'm also curious what it is about the drug that actually causes mutation instead of simply bringing them out with selection pressure like normal antibiotics. Could just be poor translation from reviewed article -> dumb people article, but could be something cool, too.