then stack like a shopping cart with six to eight fitting into a typical parking space Since that's how they park in Milan anyway, the transition should be pretty painless.
Back several years ago when Star Wars Galaxies just came out, my brother did a similar avatar experiment on me. SWG only allowed one character per server per game copy so my brother went out and bought a second copy of the game and another computer to run a full time mining character on the same server as our adventuring characters (ah, the glory days when we still thought that kind of thing was important). He failed to mention this detail to me. One day we were out questing (using headsets) and this very random character came up to me in Mos Eisley and started following me around typing a stream of non sequiturs like "what's the frequency Kenneth? Reveal the blue bug rathouse conspiracy!" over and over. My brother and I had this extended conversation in the headsets about how random and rude this was until I finally caught on when the freaky character mentioned some inside joke (which took me aback initially). Invasion of "online space" is rarely Evil, but it can be really, really annoying and distracting. I doubt this is a surprise to anyone.
I do understand the general concern that jamming might reduce access to emergency services. However, the emotional pitch of some of the anti-jamming posts is quite shrill. No one is using any real data to make the 911 access argument, they are only envisioning worst-case "what if" situations and then appealing to our emotion (an argumentative fallacy). Keep in mind general 911 service via cell phones is a (very) recent thing. People did fine before that using landlines -- and landlines at businesses where jamming might take place are still ubiquitous. The real issue is the _expectation_ of mobile services and _active_, _covert_ blocking of those services (PASSIVE blockign of services from poor coverage etc. is different). This is what is really bugging people -- and rightly so. Spontaneous (covert) jamming is currently illegal and should probably stay that way for about a dozen reasons (also note, for similar reasons, I can't set up a radio station broadcasting above a certain power level anywhere I want either). Nevertheless, if jamming is made legal (I do think some places can make an argument that cell phone's should be off limits), the jammers should be required to clearly post that jamming is taking place and direct users to the nearest jam-free zone.
They concluded that the authors of the electronic messages show less signs of serious mental illness, but they are more profane and disorganized. I can see the headlines now:
"New study links use of paper products to serious mental illness. Is The Office contributing? News at 11!"
I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of slackers suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced. If university students are WRITING Wikipedia articles as PART of their assignments, where the hell will they cut and paste from in order to finish by the deadline? And what online resource, pray tell, will the professor go to now to determine if a student has been cutting and pasting? Its like a frickin' hall of mirrors!
Yes, yes, that's all well and good, but what about The Sunshine Band? That finally explains the hits "That's the Way (I Like It in the Court of the Crimson King)" and "I'm Your 21st Century Boogie Man."
Specific intervals are pleasing largely because of the way their overtones line up; that's why pretty much every music system has a third, a fifth and an octave. I'd bet that producing music is done based on memory and calibration, the same way many other actions are done; no math involved. Point well taken. As you probably know, that what is considered a pleasing tone is very culturally dependent. Most of the world's music involves what to "western ears" sounds microtonal -- but perhaps 3rds, 5ths, and octaves are universal, I'm not sure. IF this were true, it would signal to me that there IS a hardware component to at least detecting (and reproducing) certain mathematical ratios. On the other hand, most of western music is mean tempered and only approximates perfect 3rds, and 5ths. Nevertheless, I also point out that the very notion of calibration (if that is what we are doing) is an intrinsically mathematical process involving mutiplicative or additive scaling. If we are able to do that real time, that is again a signal for a wetware math processor. However I agree using memory may or may not be mathematical (at least in the way were are talking about here).
I wonder if the brains are wired for specific bases, like base 10. It is possible, but I'm guessing this is mostly a matter of familiarity and convention. For example, Baylonians used a sexagesimal (base 60 -- a.k.a. "thanks for frickin' 360 degrees guys"...) system. As many programmers know (do I even need to say it on./?), base 2, 8, and 16 can become second nature pretty quickly with some practice and application.
A colleague of mine once pointed out that the ability of most humans to sing (speak for yourself!), play music, and even distinguish different tunes implies an intrinsic hard-wired affinity for numbers since music depends on very specific ratios of frequencies to be gauged and produced accurately real time. You are in effect doing a Fourier transform of the music, finding the strongest peaks, and reproducing them and/or scaling them by fairly exact amounts (in spite of a broad spectrum of other frequencies present creating timbre). On top of that, one is usually doing this accurately in the context of much, much lower frequencies (i.e. rhythms/tempos on the scale of Hertz rather than "tones" on the scale of 100s of Hertz) as well. Of course, not all music is western, 12 tone, tuned the same, etc., etc. etc. But I think there may still be a (fairly well understood??) psycho-acoustic music-math connection in there.
You kids and your fancy pants "WOW" "raids". As a child of the 70s and 80s I learned all the leadership training I needed from Pong and Zork. Served me well in grad school. Of course, now I'm a dice polisher for TSR^H^H^HWizards of the Coast.
Point definitely well taken. The irony is that if I view the phonograph record as a another instrument in the music rather than "bringing fidelity" to existing music, I might actually understand The Record Player People.
Another reason for vinyl's sonic superiority is that no matter how high a sampling rate is, it can never contain all of the data present in an analog groove Finally someone who understands! I've been saying the same thing about wax cylinders for years. For those in the know, the extra data is called "noise" and is due to a complex process whereby audio information is obtained by scraping one material across another and then amplifying it. A lot.
1) Create a free online encyclopedia "anyone can edit" because it will save the world;
2) With the help of the vast skills of millions of users, The Central Limit Theorem, The Law of Large Numbers, and The Wisdom of Crowds the seemingly random content mysteriously has useful value;
3) Take the most stable articles and create an online encyclopedia "anyone can buy advertising for" (including your dedicated contributors!);
4) ???
5) Profit!!!
disproved by scientific means, I remind those who are making statements to the effect that there is no God, realize that they themselves are making a faith statement since they can not prove that God does not exist. To say "there is no God" is to express an opinion for which there can be no evidence given. Please. Do all unprovable claims get equal value in your mind? Is your non belief in Zeus or the flying spaghetti monster a faith statement? There is a fallacy known as "shifting the burden of proof." That is what you are doing by claiming my non belief in your god is a belief. It isn't my job to defend a non claim. People who believe in god need to step up to the plate and actually present evidence. The fact that I have rejected the evidence presented so far does not make my non claim a claim. Moreover, the word "faith" in a religious context is ultimately an excuse to avoid evidence. In contrast, the word "belief" an a scientific context is a statement of an overabundance of evidence to support a particular claim (until better evidence to the contrary comes along). They mean different things.
Only 11% of respondents said they be willing to safely implant a device that enabled them to use their mind to access the Internet. Ahh, 11% may be small for a political poll, but 11% seems HUGE for a question like that considering it is supposed to scale up to the population at large. That would be like the entire state of California and Massachusetts together deciding to get wetware WiFi for every man, woman, and child. I expect the number of people actually willing to do such a thing in the US is much smaller than that. Neil Degrasse Tyson made a similar observation about the statistic that 93% of members of the Academy of Sciences doubt or actively disbelieve in the existence of a personal god. The 93% isn't really all that surprising. That makes sense. What is surprising to me is that 7% do.
1) yes, this is a fun list and some of the people on it are legitimate celebrity geeks;
2) if someone checks a box that says "physics major" when they are 17 then drops out of school to become a musician/actor/celeb, that does not necessarily qualify them currently as a geek. It just means they are a college dropout who didn't know what they wanted to do with their life when they were 17 (they could still be a geek, though);
3) if someone is a member of MENSA, this also does not necessarily qualify them are a geek. It just means they are insecure about their intelligence, which is merely a necessary (but not sufficient) condition for geekdom;
4) naming your child after a video game character like Zelda does not mean you are a geek, it means you are insane (something you can put on your geek CV, but is neither necessary nor sufficient for geekdom);
5) I wouldn't have thought it possible, but after this article, Natalie Portman has single-handedly propelled psychology into the hard sciences.
Great review, Zonk. HL2E2 is great bread-and-butter FPS gaming but Portal is blowing my frickin' mind. One little side note about Portal physics: somewhere early in the levels (when you are learning to use the double portal jump) it says "momenutm is conserved when going through the portal." While the magnitude of the momentum may be conserved, momentum itself (a vector) most definitely is not (for a general portal pair). In fact, the portals regularly serve to spontaneously redirect the momentum vector at your leisure. This is exactly what momentum non-conservation means. However, it is probably fair to say that mechanical energy is conserved (e.g. you enter a portal with some amount of kinetic+potential energy you exit the other side with the same amount).
Was someone from the 40s "fluent with technology" because they knew how to use a telephone, dial for an operator, or turn on a radio and tune it to their favorite program? Perhaps. But this "fluency" doesn't imply a desire to actually understand the technology or have a career doing it. People are generally adaptable and will willingly learn features and routines of any new tool they have available. But as long as it works and serves their purpose, most people of all ages don't really care beyond that. It would be like asking circa 1940 "kids these days, they are so good at dialing the operator. why aren't young people interested in a career with the phone company?" (ok, ok, a lot of people did go work for the phone company back then, but not everyone). A black box is a black box no matter what generation we are talking about. Granted, there will also be a subset of people from every generation that want to literally or figuratively take the black box and turn it into a pile of parts on the living room floor...those are the people who go into careers in the field. I'm sure "Gen Y" is no different statistically.
Also...I thought Gen Y was the one before this one? Oh, I give up...However, you know you are a "real Gen Xer" if the two generations after yours also call themselves GenXers and the generations before you calls itself the Baby Boomers. All 5523 of us: we're a true dead spot on the generation spectum. Can't even keep name the recognition.
Forget First Person Shooters. Pong was the first and best 2D Third Person Omniscient (TPO) game that used (ahem, _only_) the Law of Reflection in its physics engine. Not only were you aware of all the action in the entire game universe simultaneously, but you also knew -- no, FELT -- all the character's motivations from everyone's point of view. As if that weren't enough, the angle of incidence was always equal to the angle of reflection with respect to the surface normals. Poetry.
Slashdot Mirror
Back several years ago when Star Wars Galaxies just came out, my brother did a similar avatar experiment on me. SWG only allowed one character per server per game copy so my brother went out and bought a second copy of the game and another computer to run a full time mining character on the same server as our adventuring characters (ah, the glory days when we still thought that kind of thing was important). He failed to mention this detail to me. One day we were out questing (using headsets) and this very random character came up to me in Mos Eisley and started following me around typing a stream of non sequiturs like "what's the frequency Kenneth? Reveal the blue bug rathouse conspiracy!" over and over. My brother and I had this extended conversation in the headsets about how random and rude this was until I finally caught on when the freaky character mentioned some inside joke (which took me aback initially). Invasion of "online space" is rarely Evil, but it can be really, really annoying and distracting. I doubt this is a surprise to anyone.
I do understand the general concern that jamming might reduce access to emergency services. However, the emotional pitch of some of the anti-jamming posts is quite shrill. No one is using any real data to make the 911 access argument, they are only envisioning worst-case "what if" situations and then appealing to our emotion (an argumentative fallacy). Keep in mind general 911 service via cell phones is a (very) recent thing. People did fine before that using landlines -- and landlines at businesses where jamming might take place are still ubiquitous. The real issue is the _expectation_ of mobile services and _active_, _covert_ blocking of those services (PASSIVE blockign of services from poor coverage etc. is different). This is what is really bugging people -- and rightly so. Spontaneous (covert) jamming is currently illegal and should probably stay that way for about a dozen reasons (also note, for similar reasons, I can't set up a radio station broadcasting above a certain power level anywhere I want either). Nevertheless, if jamming is made legal (I do think some places can make an argument that cell phone's should be off limits), the jammers should be required to clearly post that jamming is taking place and direct users to the nearest jam-free zone.
I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of slackers suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced. If university students are WRITING Wikipedia articles as PART of their assignments, where the hell will they cut and paste from in order to finish by the deadline? And what online resource, pray tell, will the professor go to now to determine if a student has been cutting and pasting? Its like a frickin' hall of mirrors!
would be happy with the (apparent?) hypocrisy of EMI:
Don't judge a book by the cover
Unless you cover just another
And blind acceptance is a sign
Of stupid fools who stand in line
Like
E.m.i
3rd base maybe, but not base 3.
"fnord" in base 35 is 23525858. Coincidence? I think not!
A colleague of mine once pointed out that the ability of most humans to sing (speak for yourself!), play music, and even distinguish different tunes implies an intrinsic hard-wired affinity for numbers since music depends on very specific ratios of frequencies to be gauged and produced accurately real time. You are in effect doing a Fourier transform of the music, finding the strongest peaks, and reproducing them and/or scaling them by fairly exact amounts (in spite of a broad spectrum of other frequencies present creating timbre). On top of that, one is usually doing this accurately in the context of much, much lower frequencies (i.e. rhythms/tempos on the scale of Hertz rather than "tones" on the scale of 100s of Hertz) as well. Of course, not all music is western, 12 tone, tuned the same, etc., etc. etc. But I think there may still be a (fairly well understood??) psycho-acoustic music-math connection in there.
You kids and your fancy pants "WOW" "raids". As a child of the 70s and 80s I learned all the leadership training I needed from Pong and Zork. Served me well in grad school. Of course, now I'm a dice polisher for TSR^H^H^HWizards of the Coast.
I do seriously miss the LP album art.
Point definitely well taken. The irony is that if I view the phonograph record as a another instrument in the music rather than "bringing fidelity" to existing music, I might actually understand The Record Player People.
1) Create a free online encyclopedia "anyone can edit" because it will save the world;
2) With the help of the vast skills of millions of users, The Central Limit Theorem, The Law of Large Numbers, and The Wisdom of Crowds the seemingly random content mysteriously has useful value;
3) Take the most stable articles and create an online encyclopedia "anyone can buy advertising for" (including your dedicated contributors!);
4) ???
5) Profit!!!
1) yes, this is a fun list and some of the people on it are legitimate celebrity geeks; 2) if someone checks a box that says "physics major" when they are 17 then drops out of school to become a musician/actor/celeb, that does not necessarily qualify them currently as a geek. It just means they are a college dropout who didn't know what they wanted to do with their life when they were 17 (they could still be a geek, though); 3) if someone is a member of MENSA, this also does not necessarily qualify them are a geek. It just means they are insecure about their intelligence, which is merely a necessary (but not sufficient) condition for geekdom; 4) naming your child after a video game character like Zelda does not mean you are a geek, it means you are insane (something you can put on your geek CV, but is neither necessary nor sufficient for geekdom); 5) I wouldn't have thought it possible, but after this article, Natalie Portman has single-handedly propelled psychology into the hard sciences.
Great review, Zonk. HL2E2 is great bread-and-butter FPS gaming but Portal is blowing my frickin' mind. One little side note about Portal physics: somewhere early in the levels (when you are learning to use the double portal jump) it says "momenutm is conserved when going through the portal." While the magnitude of the momentum may be conserved, momentum itself (a vector) most definitely is not (for a general portal pair). In fact, the portals regularly serve to spontaneously redirect the momentum vector at your leisure. This is exactly what momentum non-conservation means. However, it is probably fair to say that mechanical energy is conserved (e.g. you enter a portal with some amount of kinetic+potential energy you exit the other side with the same amount).
Also...I thought Gen Y was the one before this one? Oh, I give up...However, you know you are a "real Gen Xer" if the two generations after yours also call themselves GenXers and the generations before you calls itself the Baby Boomers. All 5523 of us: we're a true dead spot on the generation spectum. Can't even keep name the recognition.
Forget First Person Shooters. Pong was the first and best 2D Third Person Omniscient (TPO) game that used (ahem, _only_) the Law of Reflection in its physics engine. Not only were you aware of all the action in the entire game universe simultaneously, but you also knew -- no, FELT -- all the character's motivations from everyone's point of view. As if that weren't enough, the angle of incidence was always equal to the angle of reflection with respect to the surface normals. Poetry.
I'm not so sure about your claims, but those are some really great pictures!