If you believe the makers, the Monkey Island series is still around. In 4 they hinted at a fifth, but I doubt it... four sucked.
I liked 1-3 a lot. They were really, really funny. But in 4, the controls were just too backwards. Instead of clicking on that rubber chicken you want to pull, you have to hold down an arrow key and wait for him to slowly rotate around to facing the chicken, then hold down the forward key until he is in range. When he comes in range, the option to pull the chicken pops up on the bottom of the screen and you click on it. Hooray for 3D! I quit after 20 minutes.
This works until one of your friends enters your email address into a form on the web (say to send you a electronic birthday card) and it gets added to a spammers list...
I suggest anyone who uses my idea cut down on the potential leaks by having very few friends.
But seriously, I'm not an idiot. I know there are ways around my little scheme. That's why I said 100%-ish and not 100%.
I've had this setup for about a year now and it has worked at literally 100% for me, but then, I have very few friends. And hey, if spammers get my current e-mail address, I'll just change it and get another spam-free year (I hope).
I have a real, useable e-mail account that never recieves any spam at all, and I never delete/filter legitimate mail! How is this possible?
I have two e-mail addresses. One gets nothing but spam, and the other gets no spam at all.
I have a free account at hotmail.com and a private one on a server that isn't owned by a big business. When I'm giving my address to someone I know personally, I give the private one. When I have to give an e-mail address to sign up for some service or to get some account, or basically whenever I'm giving my e-mail address but I don't know who is getting it, I give my hotmail account.
Result: -My hotmail account occasionally gets confirmation e-mails when I've just created one of those free accounts for some website, but I always know when they're coming. Otherwise, it just collects spam, which I periodically delete (and block the addresses it came from). -My personal account never gets spam.
(I have a university account that forwards to my private account, so occasionally it gets what could be called "spam" that's aimed at univ. students, but if I stop the forwarding it stops the spam, so I don't really have a problem.)
Chances are that most kids are going to be more adept at using the computer than their parents, resulting in either ineffective monitoring by the parent or evasion of monitoring by kids.
In as few as 30 years, the ruling class will be made up largely by people who grew up with computers - and there has never been an oppressed community (the net-savvy) whose distinguishing charachteristic (the internet) acted directly as such a powerful organizing tool.
Mark my words - within our lifetimes, it will become impossible for this kind of fascist bullshit to get pushed through government, and computer law will make sense. Maybe this is already happening.
In the meantime, parents who want "a fighting chance" should take note: drop the "I am not a computer person" attitude and learn what your kids already know about the internet. It actually takes less effort to do this than it takes to whine about your problems to the government. And your kids will be overjoyed at the chance to teach you something!
Piracy and Copyright Infringement
on
Shutting down Kazaa
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Let's not go throwing around insults without understanding what they mean.
"...committing priacy and copyright..."
Both of these are violations of the law, but so what? Law is not the same as Right, and in fact, it has often been the opposite. It's possible to argue that music sharing amounts to civil disobedience, which all political theorists (who are not currently in power) will tell you is a Good Thing. Let's remember that a Good Thing is what's best for people in general, not what's best for the coorporations.
Here's how to make that argument:
Obviously, the system won't work if everyone gets their music for free. The recording companies won't make any profit, and people in general won't hear well-recorded music at all. This, however, does not by itself justify the bullshit that recording companies are putting us through. It is entirely possible for most people to get their music for free, and a few to pay for it.
People like CDs. They like the package, the booklet, the pictures. So, it's likely that of the people who download lots of free music, those of them who can afford to will buy the CDs they particularly like. Since about $17 of every $20 CD is pure profit for the record company, they really don't have to sell to a very high percentage of their audience. Some people say that this is the reason why record sales were at a peak before Napster died, and have dropped off since. I, personally, bought 5 of the 7 RIAA CDs I own because I heard the music first for free, illegally.
That would lead us to believe that we'd all be better off with filesharing/ piracy, even the giant rich companies everyone hates. Besides, making it illegal is like prohibition - now the only people who purvey shared files are themselves criminals, and can't be trusted. We all know what Kazaa tries to do to our computers.
<rant>
Another (moderatly less convincing) way to make this argument is to say that those &^%*& record companies shouldn't charge so much. Maybe if they charged a reasonable amount, like $7, for each CD, more peopel would buy. The reason this is less likely to convince is that free market capitalists will argue that the all-knowing public in this, our idealized capitalistic economy, would have counteracted any selfish moves of the businesses and prices will have already reached their equillibrium. The fact is that this just isn't true; the music industry, just like most others in America, is an oligopily, which functions just like a monopoly except that it avoids the letter of the law against monopolies.
This task will be a lot more possible as years pass. Why?
According to this, in 100 years, there will be about half as many species on earth as there are now. We're actually in the middle of the biggest extinction epidemic since the dinosaurs died out.
Scratch that - according to this other site, this is actually the fastest mass extinction in earth's history. The fact that most people don't know about this is made even more strange by the fact that this extinction epidemic is man-made.
Maybe you mean Hillary Rosen, the evil dictator of the RIAA. Of course, you could just be misspelling Hillary Rodham, the maiden name of Hillary Rodham Clintan, former first lady and senator of NY, who has nothing to do with this post. Is that it?
A "two-dimensional" sphere is an ambiguous thing to say. The article could have meant several things. Let me start from the top.
Doesn't a sphere in its basic definition mean 3 dimensions?
No. Strictly speaking, a sphere is "the set of all points an equal distance from a particular point." When we say sphere without saying how many dimensions we're working in, people tend to assume we're working in the standard three dimansions. A sphere in one dimension is the two points the same distance away from the sphere's center in either direction. A sphere in two dimensions is a circle (just the curve around the outside - not the middle area) A sphere in three dimensions is a hollow ball. A sphere in four dimensions can't be pictured.
However, a sphere in two dimensions itself is only a one-dimensional thing. It's a bent line. It has length, but no area.
Likewise, a sphere in three demensions is a two-dimensional sphere. It's only the shell - it has (surface) area, but no volume.
Without proving it, I can see that a sphere in four dimensions (commonly called a hypersphere) will be three-dimensional. So, when the article mentions a three-dimensional sphere, they really mean a sphere in four dimensions.
This is a bit of an obnoxious distinction to make, and I certainly think they should have phrased it differently. Usually people say three-sphere when they mean a sphere in three dimensions, which is in fact just a surface and thus two-dimensional. Then, we can say n-sphere and have a sphere in n-dimensional space that is an n-1 dimensional object. However, this kind of quibbling tends to have no effect on proof, which is what math on this level concerns itself with anyway.
We had to walk to school through six feet of snow, year round, through the blistering heat, straight up, both ways, and we liked it.
Bah.
Just because it's possible to do things in a older, harder way, doesn't mean they should be done this way. To paraphrase, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it," doesn't mean "If it works, don't improve it."
Here's what's more or less a mathematical proof of why you'd be retarded not to use smilies:
In information theory, information is defined as uncertainty. The more possible messages that can be received, the more information one of them carries. This means that if you are sending a stream of bits (ones and zeroes, like computers use), you'd have to send many, many bits to achieve the same level of information density as if you were sending roman charachters, of which there are 26. We humans typically communicate using words, of which we have thousands, which we represent with strings of 26 unique letters and some punctuation marks. The word "complimentary" carries much more information to its recipient than any one letter, say, "f", simply because there are too few letters for one of them to carry such a specialized meaning. As such, if we can take the formerly meaningless string:-) and assign it a meaning, if only in type, then we have contributed to the information density of every word we type. This is because not only does the person who reads a:-) know that we intend the preceeding statement to be a joke, but he or she can also deduce that based on our awareness and usage of this charachter, that we will not try to approximate it using other words. This means that if I were to use words one might otherwise use to approximate the meaning of a:-), the reciever of the message can know that I must have some reason for using the words instead of the:-). Therefor, to outlaw any potential meaning carrier needlessly cripples communication. If we can assume that each person's goal while using verbal communication is to clearly and quickly communicate a specific message, then it always serves this goal to incoorporate new meaningful symbols and thus more uncertainty (information), and it always works to the contrary to remove symbols.
Think of '80s mallrat bimbos. They only had 3 words: "like", "y'know", and "whatever". Remember how many of these they had to string together to get meaning out of them? "Like, y'know, like, whatever, y'know?"
Interestingly, the same argument can be used to show that it's retarded to outlaw words like fuck, shit, and ass.:-)
Once you look at the level your brain is most comfortable with, you can see the art and creativity.
First of all, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and beauty is relative. Everything is beautiful; some things are simply not very beautiful (or maybe negatively beautiful; whatever), just like very cold things simply have very little heat. Of course something is beautiful if you look at it on the level your brain likes most. What if I look at a rotten, brown banana peel soaking in a mixture of used motor oil and fly-infested human feces? Not beautiful. But what if I look at it through a microscope? I might find the microscopic structure beautiful. I have not, however, changed what I'm looking at; only how I'm looking at it. Remember, beauty is not just in the beholder, it is also in his or her "eye."
As for artistic expression, an object is art if and only if two conditions are met: someone created it, and that creator claims/intends that the creature is art. I don't want to get into the argument of whether humans are the creatures of some more powerful entity; the point is that unless you manage to convince the entire rest of the world that humans are creatures and not accidents, you cannot expect people to agree with you when you say that humans are works of art. A rock formation may be beautiful, but it is not art unless someone put it that way on purpose.
Using electricity, it splits table salt (NaCl) into Na+ and Cl- ions, and you get chlorinated, swimming pool water. And the Na+ is recycled by recombining with Cl- and all you ever add is salt
A while ago I read Neal Stephenson's Zodiac, which mentions chlorene. This post rang a bell, so I dug it up and pawed through it to find what it had to say. The book only tells you about the situation in bits and pieces, so this really took some searching:
Ionic chlorene's easy to get. It's in seawater. If you want to manufacture a whole catalog of industrial chemicals, you have to convert ionic chlorine into the covalent variety. You do that by subtracting an electron. And it's just about that simple. You take a tank of seawater and you put a couple of bare wires into it. You hook up a source of electrical power up between the wires, and current - a stream of electrons - flows through the water. The molecules get rearranged. The ionic chlorine turns into the covalent kind, which is what you want. The sodium joins up with fractured water molecules to form sodium hydroxide. Or lye and alkali, depending on how educated you are....
If you're an engineer, and you're not very bright, it's easy to love polychlorinated biphenyls. They are cheap, stable, and easy to make and they take heat very well. That's why they end up in heat exchangers and electrical transformers. It's how they got into that machine in Japan and, when the pipes started to leak, it's how they got into a lot of rice oil. Unfortunately, rice oil is for human consumption, and as soon as humans enter the equation, PCBs no longer look very good. The problem with humans is that they have a lot of fat in their bodies, and PCBs have this vicious affinity for fat. They dissolve themselves in human fat cells and they never leave. They are studded with loose chlorine atoms that know how to break up chromosomes. So when that heat exchanger started leaking, the city of Kusho, Japan started to look like the site of a Biblical plague. Newborn babies came out undersized and dark brown. People started to waste away. They developed a fairly disgusting skin rash called chloracne and felt very sick....
A benzene ring is a six-pack of carbon atoms. The six-pack is held together. It's stable. It's strong. It takes some effort to pull one of the atoms off. There are a couple different kinds. If you put two six-packs together, you have a twelve-pack. THe six-packs are phenyls, a twelve-pack is a biphenyl. If the six-packs are benzenes, it's a dibenzodioxin, because the connection between the six-packs is made by using a couple of oxygen atoms. But the toxic part of polychlorinated dibenzodioxin (PCDDs) and polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) is the chlorine. The biphenyl or dibenzodioxin structure dissolves easily in fat. Once it gets into your body fat, it never leaves. The second bad thing is, the chlorine there is in covalent form; it's got the normal number of electrons, whereas the chlorine in (safe) table salt is in ionic form. It's got an extra electron. The difference is that covalent chlorine is more reactive; it has these big electron clouds that can f*** up your chromosomes. And it slips right through your cell membranes. Ionic chlorine ddoesn't - the cell membranes are made to stop it.
In Stephenson's book, this guy Sangamon Taylor runs around trying to take down corporations that electrocute seawater to create PCBs, use the PCBs as coolant, then dump them into Boston harbor. Stephenson makes it seem like the root of all evil is zapping salt water, because it produces organic chlorine. So I would be very, very careful about intentionally electrocuting salt water and then swimming in it.
It seems like there must be something more to this if, as you said, "This Old House" recommended the process. Maybe it works differently with plain salt water as opposed to sea water. Or something. Scares the crap out of me, though. Maybe someone smarter can tell me what I'm talking about?
First of all, "Kids these days" are not universally stupid. I base this on myself as a counterexample: I'm only two years out of high school. I'm 21. Does that qualify me as young? Now I'll try to convince you that I'm not stupid - this will also lead me into my main point, which is coincidentally the part where I talk about these lowest common denominator kids I mentioned in the subject of this post.
I teach math - at the same high school I graduated from two years ago. I don't have a degree, so they can't hire me as a professional; instead, they pay me as a $15/hr tutor. But they send me the "lowest common denominators"; they send me the kids the professional teachers can't teach, because I can.
If I said that right, that qualifies me as smart, refuting the point made earlier (in this post's parent's parent) that kids these days don't know jack. It also leads into the point I'm more interested in: that the problem isn't the lowest common denominators. They can indeed be taught. You speak of these people asif they were lepers. We can't cure their disease, and they are hurting us by being around, so just shut them away and forget about them? That's what I thought in high school, too, but not since it's been my job to teach them. While it's true that it's possible for kids to have low natural talent with math (which doesn't matter, if you can get them interested), it generally isn't the problem. The low-end students are almost always normally skilled - their problem is their attitude. For one reason or another, they don't want to learn math.
What you're probably expecting to hear from me now is my theory on why they have bad attitudes. I have a couple idle speculations, but I don't really care; my job is just to get math in their heads. What's important is knowing how to fix a bad attitude, not who to blame for it.
It's literally impossible to make math cool to a high school student. It is pretty much as not-cool as things get by the high-school-popularity definition of "cool." They know better. So do you. Forget about cool. They way to make them want to learn math is to show them what it has done. Since I've started teaching math, I've worked up a repitoire of examples from the real world where people need math. I don't mean the lame-assed examples you get in math classes (what if I am three times more than two years older than my five-year-old niece?) - the kid knows, just as you do, that that'll never happen. You have to come up with something that shows them plainly that math really is useful. Here is an example:
Once, I was given the task of showing a student how to use ratios. I found a scale drawing of a house in the library - basically blueprints. I gave him a ruler and a calculator and asked him to draw the house on a poster, only bigger. It looked like crap. Then I did it, and it looked perfect. He asked me how I did it. He wanted to know. That's all you can hope for. After that, teaching him was a breeze. When he took the final for that class, he got all the questions on ratios right, and averaged 40% on the rest of it - stuff that nobody had ever interested him in.
You can't teach anyone how to do math unless you first teach them why, no matter how smart they are, and any idiot who's motivated can handle high school algebra.
...all of its children. After each iteration beginning with 196, you get another number that will never become a palindrome. 196 + 691 = 887 887 + 788 = 1675
Obviously, if 196 doesn't work, then 691 won't, and neither will 887, or 788, or 1675 etc Or did the article mention that another condition for Lychrel numbers was that the number can't be part of another one's sequence?
I completely agree. Who wants to date a girl to whom whether or not you're willing to waste a significant chunk of your net worth to prove it is a deal-breaker? Am I the only one who has noticed that the emperor has no clothes on?
So... Ms. casualgeorge... what are you doing this weekend?;)
Star Wars has some strange physics. For example, 'Light Speed' makes a trip to Tatooine seem like a a weekend camping trip.
In Star Wars, they often refer to going light speed, which is patently impossible to do subjectively. You can only asymptotically approach it.
However, they also often refer to "hyperspace," which I would assume in the fine tradition of hypercubes, hyperspheres, and hypertext means "another dimesnion." They could easily go way faster than lightspeed objectively by taking 5th-dimensional shortcuts - that's the whole idea behind wormholes and quantum tunneling.
The charachters got it wrong by calling it "light speed," since they are going far more slowly than lightspeed subjectively and far more quickly objectivly, but they are only charachters. They can be wrong.
I know you're joking, but the post demonstrates an underlying societal reverse sexism that I make a point of whining about often. Imagine! I have to call it "reverse" sexism for anyone to even imagine that sexism could apply to men.
Stick to flowers. your success rate will greatly improve.
It's not every guy's goal in life to get a date at all costs. There are some of us who don't go around throwing gifts at anything with a vagina, begging and pleading with our female masters for their priceless presence on a date. Since when does every relationship have to be started by the guy? I've had five girlfriends, and four of them did the asking. I never gave gifts to any of them except on their birtday or on special occasions, and one of them insisted on paying for half of everything. Kudos to them. Not to you.
Just last week, I read an article in Mother Jones magazine about Robert Moses
I first read his name as Robot Moses (took me about three re-readings of that sentence to realize it wasn't). I thought he was an invention, not a person. Now there's an application of science and technology!
"I want to be the founding member of the "Mile-low club"
Sorry, no can do.
You need some serious hardware to reach that depth. The pressure is over a ton per square inch at a mile down. The specs on the website state 1000 feet for the main sub and 2000 feet for the mini-sub.
Okay, so it is difficult, but under this argument it is still possible to do. You just need to invent the right equipment.
The REAL reason you can't be the founding member of the mile-low club is I already am:)
Slashdot Mirror
Shock news: Luke is Darth Vader's son!
You have ruined it for me forever!
that he might be doing it on purpose? To annoy you?
If you believe the makers, the Monkey Island series is still around. In 4 they hinted at a fifth, but I doubt it... four sucked.
I liked 1-3 a lot. They were really, really funny. But in 4, the controls were just too backwards. Instead of clicking on that rubber chicken you want to pull, you have to hold down an arrow key and wait for him to slowly rotate around to facing the chicken, then hold down the forward key until he is in range. When he comes in range, the option to pull the chicken pops up on the bottom of the screen and you click on it. Hooray for 3D! I quit after 20 minutes.
Maybe that's why it's a dying genre.
This works until one of your friends enters your email address into a form on the web (say to send you a electronic birthday card) and it gets added to a spammers list...
I suggest anyone who uses my idea cut down on the potential leaks by having very few friends.
But seriously, I'm not an idiot. I know there are ways around my little scheme. That's why I said 100%-ish and not 100%.
I've had this setup for about a year now and it has worked at literally 100% for me, but then, I have very few friends. And hey, if spammers get my current e-mail address, I'll just change it and get another spam-free year (I hope).
I have a real, useable e-mail account that never recieves any spam at all, and I never delete/filter legitimate mail! How is this possible?
I have two e-mail addresses. One gets nothing but spam, and the other gets no spam at all.
I have a free account at hotmail.com and a private one on a server that isn't owned by a big business. When I'm giving my address to someone I know personally, I give the private one. When I have to give an e-mail address to sign up for some service or to get some account, or basically whenever I'm giving my e-mail address but I don't know who is getting it, I give my hotmail account.
Result:
-My hotmail account occasionally gets confirmation e-mails when I've just created one of those free accounts for some website, but I always know when they're coming. Otherwise, it just collects spam, which I periodically delete (and block the addresses it came from).
-My personal account never gets spam.
(I have a university account that forwards to my private account, so occasionally it gets what could be called "spam" that's aimed at univ. students, but if I stop the forwarding it stops the spam, so I don't really have a problem.)
Chances are that most kids are going to be more adept at using the computer than their parents, resulting in either ineffective monitoring by the parent or evasion of monitoring by kids.
In as few as 30 years, the ruling class will be made up largely by people who grew up with computers - and there has never been an oppressed community (the net-savvy) whose distinguishing charachteristic (the internet) acted directly as such a powerful organizing tool.
Mark my words - within our lifetimes, it will become impossible for this kind of fascist bullshit to get pushed through government, and computer law will make sense. Maybe this is already happening.
In the meantime, parents who want "a fighting chance" should take note: drop the "I am not a computer person" attitude and learn what your kids already know about the internet. It actually takes less effort to do this than it takes to whine about your problems to the government. And your kids will be overjoyed at the chance to teach you something!
Let's not go throwing around insults without understanding what they mean.
"...committing priacy and copyright..."
Both of these are violations of the law, but so what? Law is not the same as Right, and in fact, it has often been the opposite. It's possible to argue that music sharing amounts to civil disobedience, which all political theorists (who are not currently in power) will tell you is a Good Thing. Let's remember that a Good Thing is what's best for people in general, not what's best for the coorporations.
Here's how to make that argument:
Obviously, the system won't work if everyone gets their music for free. The recording companies won't make any profit, and people in general won't hear well-recorded music at all. This, however, does not by itself justify the bullshit that recording companies are putting us through. It is entirely possible for most people to get their music for free, and a few to pay for it.
People like CDs. They like the package, the booklet, the pictures. So, it's likely that of the people who download lots of free music, those of them who can afford to will buy the CDs they particularly like. Since about $17 of every $20 CD is pure profit for the record company, they really don't have to sell to a very high percentage of their audience. Some people say that this is the reason why record sales were at a peak before Napster died, and have dropped off since. I, personally, bought 5 of the 7 RIAA CDs I own because I heard the music first for free, illegally.
That would lead us to believe that we'd all be better off with filesharing/ piracy, even the giant rich companies everyone hates. Besides, making it illegal is like prohibition - now the only people who purvey shared files are themselves criminals, and can't be trusted. We all know what Kazaa tries to do to our computers.
<rant>
Another (moderatly less convincing) way to make this argument is to say that those &^%*& record companies shouldn't charge so much. Maybe if they charged a reasonable amount, like $7, for each CD, more peopel would buy. The reason this is less likely to convince is that free market capitalists will argue that the all-knowing public in this, our idealized capitalistic economy, would have counteracted any selfish moves of the businesses and prices will have already reached their equillibrium. The fact is that this just isn't true; the music industry, just like most others in America, is an oligopily, which functions just like a monopoly except that it avoids the letter of the law against monopolies.
</rant>
This task will be a lot more possible as years pass. Why?
According to this, in 100 years, there will be about half as many species on earth as there are now. We're actually in the middle of the biggest extinction epidemic since the dinosaurs died out.
Scratch that - according to this other site, this is actually the fastest mass extinction in earth's history. The fact that most people don't know about this is made even more strange by the fact that this extinction epidemic is man-made.
Maybe you mean Hillary Rosen, the evil dictator of the RIAA. Of course, you could just be misspelling Hillary Rodham, the maiden name of Hillary Rodham Clintan, former first lady and senator of NY, who has nothing to do with this post. Is that it?
A "two-dimensional" sphere is an ambiguous thing to say. The article could have meant several things. Let me start from the top.
Doesn't a sphere in its basic definition mean 3 dimensions?
No. Strictly speaking, a sphere is "the set of all points an equal distance from a particular point." When we say sphere without saying how many dimensions we're working in, people tend to assume we're working in the standard three dimansions.
A sphere in one dimension is the two points the same distance away from the sphere's center in either direction.
A sphere in two dimensions is a circle (just the curve around the outside - not the middle area)
A sphere in three dimensions is a hollow ball.
A sphere in four dimensions can't be pictured.
However, a sphere in two dimensions itself is only a one-dimensional thing. It's a bent line. It has length, but no area.
Likewise, a sphere in three demensions is a two-dimensional sphere. It's only the shell - it has (surface) area, but no volume.
Without proving it, I can see that a sphere in four dimensions (commonly called a hypersphere) will be three-dimensional. So, when the article mentions a three-dimensional sphere, they really mean a sphere in four dimensions.
This is a bit of an obnoxious distinction to make, and I certainly think they should have phrased it differently. Usually people say three-sphere when they mean a sphere in three dimensions, which is in fact just a surface and thus two-dimensional. Then, we can say n-sphere and have a sphere in n-dimensional space that is an n-1 dimensional object. However, this kind of quibbling tends to have no effect on proof, which is what math on this level concerns itself with anyway.
We had to walk to school through six feet of snow, year round, through the blistering heat, straight up, both ways, and we liked it.
:-) and assign it a meaning, if only in type, then we have contributed to the information density of every word we type. This is because not only does the person who reads a :-) know that we intend the preceeding statement to be a joke, but he or she can also deduce that based on our awareness and usage of this charachter, that we will not try to approximate it using other words. This means that if I were to use words one might otherwise use to approximate the meaning of a :-), the reciever of the message can know that I must have some reason for using the words instead of the :-). Therefor, to outlaw any potential meaning carrier needlessly cripples communication. If we can assume that each person's goal while using verbal communication is to clearly and quickly communicate a specific message, then it always serves this goal to incoorporate new meaningful symbols and thus more uncertainty (information), and it always works to the contrary to remove symbols.
:-)
Bah.
Just because it's possible to do things in a older, harder way, doesn't mean they should be done this way. To paraphrase, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it," doesn't mean "If it works, don't improve it."
Here's what's more or less a mathematical proof of why you'd be retarded not to use smilies:
In information theory, information is defined as uncertainty. The more possible messages that can be received, the more information one of them carries. This means that if you are sending a stream of bits (ones and zeroes, like computers use), you'd have to send many, many bits to achieve the same level of information density as if you were sending roman charachters, of which there are 26. We humans typically communicate using words, of which we have thousands, which we represent with strings of 26 unique letters and some punctuation marks. The word "complimentary" carries much more information to its recipient than any one letter, say, "f", simply because there are too few letters for one of them to carry such a specialized meaning. As such, if we can take the formerly meaningless string
Think of '80s mallrat bimbos. They only had 3 words: "like", "y'know", and "whatever". Remember how many of these they had to string together to get meaning out of them? "Like, y'know, like, whatever, y'know?"
Interestingly, the same argument can be used to show that it's retarded to outlaw words like fuck, shit, and ass.
Why did you submit it three times? If they rejected it once, you know they'll reject it again.
Once you look at the level your brain is most comfortable with, you can see the art and creativity.
First of all, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and beauty is relative. Everything is beautiful; some things are simply not very beautiful (or maybe negatively beautiful; whatever), just like very cold things simply have very little heat. Of course something is beautiful if you look at it on the level your brain likes most. What if I look at a rotten, brown banana peel soaking in a mixture of used motor oil and fly-infested human feces? Not beautiful. But what if I look at it through a microscope? I might find the microscopic structure beautiful. I have not, however, changed what I'm looking at; only how I'm looking at it. Remember, beauty is not just in the beholder, it is also in his or her "eye."
As for artistic expression, an object is art if and only if two conditions are met: someone created it, and that creator claims/intends that the creature is art. I don't want to get into the argument of whether humans are the creatures of some more powerful entity; the point is that unless you manage to convince the entire rest of the world that humans are creatures and not accidents, you cannot expect people to agree with you when you say that humans are works of art. A rock formation may be beautiful, but it is not art unless someone put it that way on purpose.
There is, however, an M4A1, which is pretty much the same thing. It's a little smaller, and a little lighter, and it's what the army uses now anyway.
At the time of this post, I have score:3 interesting for asking a question, and he has score:1 for answering it.
Using electricity, it splits table salt (NaCl) into Na+ and Cl- ions, and you get chlorinated, swimming pool water. And the Na+ is recycled by recombining with Cl- and all you ever add is salt
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A while ago I read Neal Stephenson's Zodiac, which mentions chlorene. This post rang a bell, so I dug it up and pawed through it to find what it had to say. The book only tells you about the situation in bits and pieces, so this really took some searching:
Ionic chlorene's easy to get. It's in seawater. If you want to manufacture a whole catalog of industrial chemicals, you have to convert ionic chlorine into the covalent variety. You do that by subtracting an electron.
And it's just about that simple. You take a tank of seawater and you put a couple of bare wires into it. You hook up a source of electrical power up between the wires, and current - a stream of electrons - flows through the water. The molecules get rearranged. The ionic chlorine turns into the covalent kind, which is what you want. The sodium joins up with fractured water molecules to form sodium hydroxide. Or lye and alkali, depending on how educated you are.
If you're an engineer, and you're not very bright, it's easy to love polychlorinated biphenyls. They are cheap, stable, and easy to make and they take heat very well. That's why they end up in heat exchangers and electrical transformers. It's how they got into that machine in Japan and, when the pipes started to leak, it's how they got into a lot of rice oil.
Unfortunately, rice oil is for human consumption, and as soon as humans enter the equation, PCBs no longer look very good. The problem with humans is that they have a lot of fat in their bodies, and PCBs have this vicious affinity for fat. They dissolve themselves in human fat cells and they never leave. They are studded with loose chlorine atoms that know how to break up chromosomes. So when that heat exchanger started leaking, the city of Kusho, Japan started to look like the site of a Biblical plague. Newborn babies came out undersized and dark brown. People started to waste away. They developed a fairly disgusting skin rash called chloracne and felt very sick.
A benzene ring is a six-pack of carbon atoms. The six-pack is held together. It's stable. It's strong. It takes some effort to pull one of the atoms off. There are a couple different kinds. If you put two six-packs together, you have a twelve-pack. THe six-packs are phenyls, a twelve-pack is a biphenyl. If the six-packs are benzenes, it's a dibenzodioxin, because the connection between the six-packs is made by using a couple of oxygen atoms. But the toxic part of polychlorinated dibenzodioxin (PCDDs) and polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) is the chlorine.
The biphenyl or dibenzodioxin structure dissolves easily in fat. Once it gets into your body fat, it never leaves.
The second bad thing is, the chlorine there is in covalent form; it's got the normal number of electrons, whereas the chlorine in (safe) table salt is in ionic form. It's got an extra electron. The difference is that covalent chlorine is more reactive; it has these big electron clouds that can f*** up your chromosomes. And it slips right through your cell membranes. Ionic chlorine ddoesn't - the cell membranes are made to stop it.
In Stephenson's book, this guy Sangamon Taylor runs around trying to take down corporations that electrocute seawater to create PCBs, use the PCBs as coolant, then dump them into Boston harbor. Stephenson makes it seem like the root of all evil is zapping salt water, because it produces organic chlorine. So I would be very, very careful about intentionally electrocuting salt water and then swimming in it.
It seems like there must be something more to this if, as you said, "This Old House" recommended the process. Maybe it works differently with plain salt water as opposed to sea water. Or something. Scares the crap out of me, though. Maybe someone smarter can tell me what I'm talking about?
haiku is supposed
to have a season, color
and an animal.
Real haikus suck ass.
They're meaningless and boring.
Parody's better.
"black fly in spring." See?
Color, animal, season.
Does anyone care?
First of all, "Kids these days" are not universally stupid. I base this on myself as a counterexample: I'm only two years out of high school. I'm 21. Does that qualify me as young? Now I'll try to convince you that I'm not stupid - this will also lead me into my main point, which is coincidentally the part where I talk about these lowest common denominator kids I mentioned in the subject of this post.
I teach math - at the same high school I graduated from two years ago. I don't have a degree, so they can't hire me as a professional; instead, they pay me as a $15/hr tutor. But they send me the "lowest common denominators"; they send me the kids the professional teachers can't teach, because I can.
If I said that right, that qualifies me as smart, refuting the point made earlier (in this post's parent's parent) that kids these days don't know jack. It also leads into the point I'm more interested in: that the problem isn't the lowest common denominators. They can indeed be taught. You speak of these people asif they were lepers. We can't cure their disease, and they are hurting us by being around, so just shut them away and forget about them? That's what I thought in high school, too, but not since it's been my job to teach them. While it's true that it's possible for kids to have low natural talent with math (which doesn't matter, if you can get them interested), it generally isn't the problem. The low-end students are almost always normally skilled - their problem is their attitude. For one reason or another, they don't want to learn math.
What you're probably expecting to hear from me now is my theory on why they have bad attitudes. I have a couple idle speculations, but I don't really care; my job is just to get math in their heads. What's important is knowing how to fix a bad attitude, not who to blame for it.
It's literally impossible to make math cool to a high school student. It is pretty much as not-cool as things get by the high-school-popularity definition of "cool." They know better. So do you. Forget about cool. They way to make them want to learn math is to show them what it has done. Since I've started teaching math, I've worked up a repitoire of examples from the real world where people need math. I don't mean the lame-assed examples you get in math classes (what if I am three times more than two years older than my five-year-old niece?) - the kid knows, just as you do, that that'll never happen. You have to come up with something that shows them plainly that math really is useful. Here is an example:
Once, I was given the task of showing a student how to use ratios. I found a scale drawing of a house in the library - basically blueprints. I gave him a ruler and a calculator and asked him to draw the house on a poster, only bigger. It looked like crap. Then I did it, and it looked perfect. He asked me how I did it. He wanted to know. That's all you can hope for. After that, teaching him was a breeze. When he took the final for that class, he got all the questions on ratios right, and averaged 40% on the rest of it - stuff that nobody had ever interested him in.
You can't teach anyone how to do math unless you first teach them why, no matter how smart they are, and any idiot who's motivated can handle high school algebra.
...all of its children. After each iteration beginning with 196, you get another number that will never become a palindrome.
196 + 691 = 887
887 + 788 = 1675
Obviously, if 196 doesn't work, then 691 won't, and neither will 887, or 788, or 1675 etc
Or did the article mention that another condition for Lychrel numbers was that the number can't be part of another one's sequence?
...but be very careful.
"History is always too slow, but it is never kind to those who would hurry it up." -The Power of One
I completely agree. Who wants to date a girl to whom whether or not you're willing to waste a significant chunk of your net worth to prove it is a deal-breaker? Am I the only one who has noticed that the emperor has no clothes on?
;)
So... Ms. casualgeorge... what are you doing this weekend?
Star Wars has some strange physics. For example, 'Light Speed' makes a trip to Tatooine seem like a a weekend camping trip.
In Star Wars, they often refer to going light speed, which is patently impossible to do subjectively. You can only asymptotically approach it.
However, they also often refer to "hyperspace," which I would assume in the fine tradition of hypercubes, hyperspheres, and hypertext means "another dimesnion." They could easily go way faster than lightspeed objectively by taking 5th-dimensional shortcuts - that's the whole idea behind wormholes and quantum tunneling.
The charachters got it wrong by calling it "light speed," since they are going far more slowly than lightspeed subjectively and far more quickly objectivly, but they are only charachters. They can be wrong.
I know you're joking, but the post demonstrates an underlying societal reverse sexism that I make a point of whining about often. Imagine! I have to call it "reverse" sexism for anyone to even imagine that sexism could apply to men.
Stick to flowers. your success rate will greatly improve.
It's not every guy's goal in life to get a date at all costs. There are some of us who don't go around throwing gifts at anything with a vagina, begging and pleading with our female masters for their priceless presence on a date. Since when does every relationship have to be started by the guy? I've had five girlfriends, and four of them did the asking. I never gave gifts to any of them except on their birtday or on special occasions, and one of them insisted on paying for half of everything. Kudos to them. Not to you.
Just last week, I read an article in Mother Jones magazine about Robert Moses
I first read his name as Robot Moses (took me about three re-readings of that sentence to realize it wasn't). I thought he was an invention, not a person. Now there's an application of science and technology!
"I want to be the founding member of the "Mile-low club"
:)
Sorry, no can do.
You need some serious hardware to reach that depth. The pressure is over a ton per square inch at a mile down. The specs on the website state 1000 feet for the main sub and 2000 feet for the mini-sub.
Okay, so it is difficult, but under this argument it is still possible to do. You just need to invent the right equipment.
The REAL reason you can't be the founding member of the mile-low club is I already am