Have you ever tried walking up all the stairs in a very tall sky scraper? This gives you a very human feeling of the extent of the gravity well in which we sit, due to the mass of the Earth. It takes a ridiculous amount of energy just to get away from Earth. Then add to this the problem of cosmic rays and having enough of everything to get there and back, and I really have to wonder why so much thought and money and time goes into the idea that we will go to Mars. Until we have better sources of energy or a breakthrough in physics so that we can teleport places, don't you think it's a bit of a waste of time and resources to think we can take a trip to Mars? If not, why not? Basically, I'm saying, let's just explore and take care of this planet a lot better first, before we go anyplace else.
The level for a mammogram is shockingly high compared to other ordinary x-ray diagnostics. Could this be wrong? Hundreds of millions of women regularly have mammograms. How can their exposure be thousands of times higher than other x-ray therapies? This must be an error.
Video calling on cellphones has been available for years all over the world. Does anyone use it? No. Video phones have actually been available in various incarnations for almost 40 years. Many large corporations even had them implemented throughout the company. Were they ever used? No. Skype style video calling is available. How often is it used compared to voice only? Very little. So at what point do we finally agree that the experiment has been done, and repeated sufficiently so that we can conclude the simple fact: people do not want video calling. The better question is: why do companies insist on keeping this nonsense of video calling as the "next big thing" when it has been shown quite clearly to be something nobody wants? I'd love to get Slashdot's explanation of this. Please move this to Ask Slashdot perhaps.
So I went to the Jaron Lanier essay referenced in the story and started reading. After a few paragraphs, I thought to check his Wikipedia entry in another browser window and see if indeed he was called a "Film Director" on Wikipedia. No. That had been corrected. Excellent. Wikpedia seems to be working as advertised. But then further down in Lanier's Wikipedia entry there is a reference to the very Edge essay by Lanier that I was reading, and it is broken down into point form, making for much easier reading and comprehension. Neat. Finally, I went back to the Lanier's original essay to read it all the way to the very end, where it says, "Jaron Lanier is a film director". Bizarre.
Munroe was the clear winner. 1999 *BC* was just dumb, as were most of Katz's others. The only lame one of Munroe's was the strange skateboard thing. Somewhat off topic, though it gets points for originality.
Something rarely discussed in these forums is that the iPhone is the first truly successful mass-market Unix phone. This is huge, and when you start to think about it, it's marvelous. I had an N80 for a year and half before I "upgraded" to an iPhone. There is simply no comparison.The N95 is similar to the N80 in terms of its interface and functionality. I've played with the N95 in shops. The iPhone is a complete paradigm shift and well worth the few extra pounds. The subtle interface refinements are countless and all the things you will wish your N95 would do. (e.g. when you remove the headphones, the mp3 music player stops.) The sync functions are much slicker on iPhone. Plus if you consider the unlimited data and WiFi access, it's actually cheaper than the N95 option. Another cost you neglected is memory. The iPhone comes with 8GB and you need all 8. With the N95 you will be paying an extra 100pounds to match the memory of the iPhone and I'm not sure it even handles up to 8GB. Trust me: Nokia is shitting minibricks now trying to design future phones to match the iPhone. In a few years nearly all phones will be like the iPhone. Interestingly, by then Apple will likely have leapfrogged them again, and I can hardly wait to see what they come out with.
Let me say I *do* miss a few things from my N80. 1. The ability to take videos on the spot. (Though ironically the simplistic iPhone camera clearly takes better photos than the N80's 3 megapixel one which one would think would be better.) 2. Cut and paste. Most everything else is better on the iPhone, especially the amazing interface, and using firmware version 1.0.2 with third party apps for ringtones, and things such as the BSD subsystem, ssh, terminal, and everything a Unix hacker could desire. Hey, it's Unix which is far superior to Symbian in my opinion.
This is excellent science writing. However, the problem is: a pro journalist's editor would never accept this. He/she would say: can you say that in 100 words. Or even more to the point: in one sentence. This is the crux of the problem. Science writers (I am one) are constrained by editorial demands such as this.
It's not a smokescreen for that. I think it's something to do with the iPhone. All third party iPhone aps have to work through the Safari browser. Hence they had to make Safari available on Windows as part of the strategy of taking over the world of cellphones.
Ever since the days of Napster and John Perry Barlow's point about how bits are very different from atoms I've always wondered when the music industry was going to realize they had to start attaching atoms, i.e. things, to their bits. My prediction then and now are burger or t-shirt coupons. It's a win/win. Watch for it. Every CD comes with a coupon for a free Macdonalds burger. Or a t-shirt from Walmart. Something like that.
My mother cannot grasp the concept of folders. She puts every document relating to one theme in a single file; she prints out whatever pages of that file matter for a single document. It's a terrible system.
My wife is exactly the same and she's nowhere near her 60s. She keeps all her "files" in a few large Word docs. Each one starts on a different page. When she wants one, she just opens the Word doc and goes to that page, or prints "From page 6 to 9" or whatever.
I used to be bothered about this, and have tried numerous times to explain how it really works, just as thc69 tries with his mother.
However, now I'm thinking: If this is how people think, maybe the OS should present things to the user like this. Why should files and folders concern them? These common users think they've already got a good system: pages. So why don't we computer geeks give them what they want? Eventually computers are going to have to become easier than they are now, in the same way that cars got automatic transmission. Perhaps one of these concepts will be a more natural way for people to "manage files". Computer files and folders are not natural. No ordinary mortal thinks of files and folders. Getting a "fresh page" is more natural. So future operating systems should head in that direction rather than trying to get people to think of files.
I went back after ten years "out in the world". Forget about all your questions. Here's how I did it. I knew what I wanted to do. (Had to do with alternative energy engineering.) I knew where I wanted to go (UBC in Vancouver). I went to the Engineering schools there and talked with professors, told them what research I wanted to do and finally found a professor who was interested in it. After that, everything is easy.
The number one point you have to realize is this: they need you more than you need them. Universities thrive on novel ideas from grad students. That is like the gasoline that powers higher education. Once you have a research idea, it is like gold. This is because it equals grant funding, academic papers, and more.
If you are expecting someone else to come up with the ideas for your research, you start at a disadvantage. Now that you've been out in the real world for 10 years, you should KNOW what you want to work on. Just go in there and pitch it. That's what I did. Once you have a professor on side, the next step is to write a grant proposal to fund your university life and existence and that is not that hard if you know what you want and have a professor's support. The prof loves it too. After that you just do the work, create something novel, and essential, and enjoy the next three or four years.
PS: I found that graduate school life was a totally different and more enjoyable existence than undergrad. Also, it DID open doors for me. Something about that piece of paper. It does have an effect.
Slashdot Mirror
Just read John Grisham's http://www.amazon.com/Broker-John-Grisham/dp/0385510454 The Broker which is based on this idea, only the hackers are Pakistani. They all got killed in the book.
Have you ever tried walking up all the stairs in a very tall sky scraper? This gives you a very human feeling of the extent of the gravity well in which we sit, due to the mass of the Earth. It takes a ridiculous amount of energy just to get away from Earth. Then add to this the problem of cosmic rays and having enough of everything to get there and back, and I really have to wonder why so much thought and money and time goes into the idea that we will go to Mars. Until we have better sources of energy or a breakthrough in physics so that we can teleport places, don't you think it's a bit of a waste of time and resources to think we can take a trip to Mars? If not, why not? Basically, I'm saying, let's just explore and take care of this planet a lot better first, before we go anyplace else.
The level for a mammogram is shockingly high compared to other ordinary x-ray diagnostics. Could this be wrong? Hundreds of millions of women regularly have mammograms. How can their exposure be thousands of times higher than other x-ray therapies? This must be an error.
Video calling on cellphones has been available for years all over the world. Does anyone use it? No. Video phones have actually been available in various incarnations for almost 40 years. Many large corporations even had them implemented throughout the company. Were they ever used? No. Skype style video calling is available. How often is it used compared to voice only? Very little. So at what point do we finally agree that the experiment has been done, and repeated sufficiently so that we can conclude the simple fact: people do not want video calling. The better question is: why do companies insist on keeping this nonsense of video calling as the "next big thing" when it has been shown quite clearly to be something nobody wants? I'd love to get Slashdot's explanation of this. Please move this to Ask Slashdot perhaps.
So I went to the Jaron Lanier essay referenced in the story and started reading. After a few paragraphs, I thought to check his Wikipedia entry in another browser window and see if indeed he was called a "Film Director" on Wikipedia. No. That had been corrected. Excellent. Wikpedia seems to be working as advertised. But then further down in Lanier's Wikipedia entry there is a reference to the very Edge essay by Lanier that I was reading, and it is broken down into point form, making for much easier reading and comprehension. Neat. Finally, I went back to the Lanier's original essay to read it all the way to the very end, where it says, "Jaron Lanier is a film director". Bizarre.
Munroe was the clear winner. 1999 *BC* was just dumb, as were most of Katz's others. The only lame one of Munroe's was the strange skateboard thing. Somewhat off topic, though it gets points for originality.
Let me say I *do* miss a few things from my N80. 1. The ability to take videos on the spot. (Though ironically the simplistic iPhone camera clearly takes better photos than the N80's 3 megapixel one which one would think would be better.) 2. Cut and paste. Most everything else is better on the iPhone, especially the amazing interface, and using firmware version 1.0.2 with third party apps for ringtones, and things such as the BSD subsystem, ssh, terminal, and everything a Unix hacker could desire. Hey, it's Unix which is far superior to Symbian in my opinion.
This story is not about stem cells. It's about knocking out genes (mostly in mice) to figure out how what metabolic pathways certain genes control.
This is excellent science writing. However, the problem is: a pro journalist's editor would never accept this. He/she would say: can you say that in 100 words. Or even more to the point: in one sentence. This is the crux of the problem. Science writers (I am one) are constrained by editorial demands such as this.
It's not a smokescreen for that. I think it's something to do with the iPhone. All third party iPhone aps have to work through the Safari browser. Hence they had to make Safari available on Windows as part of the strategy of taking over the world of cellphones.
Ever since the days of Napster and John Perry Barlow's point about how bits are very different from atoms I've always wondered when the music industry was going to realize they had to start attaching atoms, i.e. things, to their bits. My prediction then and now are burger or t-shirt coupons. It's a win/win. Watch for it. Every CD comes with a coupon for a free Macdonalds burger. Or a t-shirt from Walmart. Something like that.
However, now I'm thinking: If this is how people think, maybe the OS should present things to the user like this. Why should files and folders concern them? These common users think they've already got a good system: pages. So why don't we computer geeks give them what they want? Eventually computers are going to have to become easier than they are now, in the same way that cars got automatic transmission. Perhaps one of these concepts will be a more natural way for people to "manage files". Computer files and folders are not natural. No ordinary mortal thinks of files and folders. Getting a "fresh page" is more natural. So future operating systems should head in that direction rather than trying to get people to think of files.
The number one point you have to realize is this: they need you more than you need them. Universities thrive on novel ideas from grad students. That is like the gasoline that powers higher education. Once you have a research idea, it is like gold. This is because it equals grant funding, academic papers, and more.
If you are expecting someone else to come up with the ideas for your research, you start at a disadvantage. Now that you've been out in the real world for 10 years, you should KNOW what you want to work on. Just go in there and pitch it. That's what I did. Once you have a professor on side, the next step is to write a grant proposal to fund your university life and existence and that is not that hard if you know what you want and have a professor's support. The prof loves it too. After that you just do the work, create something novel, and essential, and enjoy the next three or four years.
PS: I found that graduate school life was a totally different and more enjoyable existence than undergrad. Also, it DID open doors for me. Something about that piece of paper. It does have an effect.