I discovered the Microsoft Multimedia Keyboard (that has since been generally discontinued, of course) which did shuffle around Home/End/Delete/P.up/P.down, etc., but did so in an entirely logical manner... at least for Windows usage. I wouldn't use it for editing in UNIX, but it matches the function of Windows text editors quite well. [It also compresses the horizontal width of the keyboard, moving in the numpad and arrow keys, thus making all key accesses somewhat easier for small hands.]
Instead of being a 3 column x 2 row 6 button layout, it is a 2 column x 3 row layout with an oversize Delete button (Insert got kicked off, which is fine by me given how rarely I actually use it). First off, this puts all the buttons in better reach of my small hands, and significantly increases the ease of hitting "Delete". (No, I haven't had a problem with accidental deletes, either).
Also, Home and End sit horizontally adjacent which is much more intuitive than the usual vertical layout given their far left/far right operation in Windows text editors. Page Up and Page Down remain vertically adjacent in the right column of the rectangle, as befits their operation.
All in all, I've found it to be a wonderfully comfortable keyboard, especially as it is missing the extra keys that often appear around the cursor arrows. They made the annoying move of giving the function keys odd shortcut abilities, but a single keypress (that is remembered by the keyboard, so it persists even during computer power-off) restores their normal functions. The "bonus" buttons along the top edge are completely customizable (I have them linked to things like Firefox, Gmail, iTunes, etc.) and more than make up for the function-key oddness.
i suspect this is likely the case with most people who are able to type at any reasonable pace.
I have tiny hands, you insensitive clod!
Honestly, though, I do have fingers that are short enough that is uncomfortable for me to hold down the shift key while trying to type more than a few capital letters at a time. For me, adding two key presses to an all-capitals header that I am including in function comments is much more efficient than either typing the whole thing at half speed because I can barely reach the needed keys or switching back and forth between shift keys every few characters.
Mary, a mother from <script type="text/javascript">document.write(geoip_city());</script>, <script type="text/javascript">document.write(geoip_region());</script> is thriving,
geoip_city()... I think I may have been there once or twice.
This wireless charging/powering is by no means a new technique. My masters thesis included plenty of material and research on this topic, and I was referencing papers on wireless powering for implants as far back as the 70's. The class-E amplifier driving an inductive coil resonantly tuned with a receiving coil is the standard architecture used by decades.
I'm confused at the submitter's hailing 'resonant coupling' as a (seemingly) recent advance, as resonant coupling is simply what happens whenever a tuned transmitter and receiver antenna communicate. In communications devices, the tuning is broad so that the receiver takes in a wide range of frequencies which are filtered out down the line. In power transmission devices, the tuning is much more narrow, as only a single frequency (the power wave) is transmitted.
Ironically, [please tell me I've used that word correctly] what makes wireless powering and charging more feasible today than 20 years ago is not an improvement in the electromagnetic theory of wireless power. Rather, it is a combination of a reduction in the power requirements of the receiving device due to advances in low-power electronics, as well as an improvement in evolution-based software which can simulate and design better and better directed antennas--something which by-hand design has never been able to do. All in all, though, it's a nice demo but isn't much in the way of new and useful science.
what happens if you place a HDD, or your phone contains a HDD and is charged using this method, wont the magnetic field damage the magnetic media??
Most HDD's are pretty well shielded, nowadays. Remember also that the receiving coil (in this case) is a 707 cm^2 wire coil, while the surface area of the hard drive in the magnetic field is likely no more than a few cm^2. (The energy absorbed by an object in this situation is proportional to its surface area in the plane perpendicular to the electric field, among other things.)
does the power consumption increase or decrease based on the number of receiving coils??
The power consumption in the primary would increase. Given the case of two coupled inductors (the two coils seen here), a mutual inductance couples the two and a "reflected impedance" is seen on each of them due to the effect of the other. In other words, if the receiving coil was consuming large amounts of power, a significant series load would appear on the transmitting coil, causing either a drop in the voltage and the transmitted power (if you hold the power consumed by the transmitting coil constant) or an increase in the consumed power (if you hold the transmitted power constant).
I'd like to point out, however, that not once in the article are the words "supernova", "nova", "explode", "boom", etc. ever mentioned. One sentence from the article reads as follows:
This could be a sign of a long-term oscillation in its size or the star's first death knells.
after which the rest of the article goes on to discuss much less spectacular but no less interesting causes of the change in luminosity (pulsations, instabilities, a potato-shaped star that is turning such that the narrow axis is perpendicular to our line of sight, etc.).
A tad sensationalist of a headline for what is a perfectly cromulent NewScientist article.
Have you heard of oodaloop syndrome? It's where you get sick of every personality quirk being called a syndrome.
Because oftentimes, it's more than just a personality quirk.
Taking the implied example of Asperger Syndrome... We know some geeks have recently taken to self-diagnosing Asperger's and using it as an odd badge of honor, but that shouldn't undermine the seriousness of the actual condition. Asperger's can manifest itself as a devastating condition where one even has difficulty engaging in conversation [not your run-of-the-mill awkwardness--imagine someone speaking to you and you hearing their words but not having a clue what they are actually saying], difficulty living in close proximity to others [something like an 80% divorce rate has been observed for those who actually progress far enough to get married], and a significantly increased risk of developing other psychiatric conditions [anxiety disorder, major depressive disorder, etc.].
Asperger's (and other syndromes) have labels so that professionals can provide essential and targeted therapy to the underlying cause, rather than just trying to treat symptoms. You cannot treat (for example) the social awkwardness caused by Pervasive Developmental Disorders (such as Asperger's) the same way you would treat social awkwardness due to a phobia, an anxiety disorder, or childhood trauma. Each condition has a label because each has a unique cause rooted somewhere in our so-complex-they-can't-understand-themselves brains, and effective therapy occurs when each cause is dealt with separately.
I think wasting 24 hours, going through airport security multiple times, sitting in an uncomfortable stuffy hot screamy cabin for 8+ hours, all the waste and waiting and bullshit and potential delays, all in order to attend a 1 hour meeting is the height of byzantine ridiculousness.
I like my version, better, given a few recent business trips down to San Diego and back:
--Relax at the airport after a long day of work with a good book and some airport food (on the company card) for an hour before the flight, --Catch up on some sleep/reading/old Scrapheap Challenge episodes for 2 hours in the air --Spend the night in comfort in a nicely kept hotel, maybe do some pedestrian sightseeing in the meantime --Enjoy free soaps and shampoos followed by a continental breakfast along with said book --Cram a month's worth of discussion into a day of face-to-face meetings, with a team lunch thrown in for good measure --Resume earlier enjoyment of book, sleep, media, or games at the airport and on the flight home.
Yeah, you can end up being elbowed for half the flight, stuck in security for what seems like an eternity, or simply lost in your destination city, but the experience of travel is extremely dependent on your mindset. I've run into all sorts of problems and hassles while traveling (Was stranded in Houston for 10 hours without my luggage, once... almost didn't make it through customs due to nitpicking another time), but traveling on my own has always been a positive experience for me.
There are just way too many factors to take into account, and personal preference should guide the decision, not the weird criterion that US News & World Report uses.
I agree fully. I attended Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. Despite receiving some ~80% of the federal research money that flows into Ohio (even competing with places like OSU, which has ten times as many students), our engineering programs have been slipping in US News &c's rankings.
Why?
Well, one of the categories that figures in to the rankings is first-year retention rate. In other universities in Ohio (such as OSU) freshmen spend the first year on general education requirements. At Case, however, freshmen start on major engineering prerequisites, with the general education requirements sprinkled on the side throughout the college experience. (This allows students to choose to take all sorts of classes with significant prerequisite requirements later in their college careers--we are a research university, after all.) However, as the engineering prerequisites are more difficult than yon gen-ed requirements, our first-year retention rate drops slightly due to the students who realize right off the bat that calculus and physics aren't their cup of tea.
On top of that, Case hires expert faculty from around the world. This means, however, that the faculty may receive honors or be members of international professional/academic societies that U.S. News & World Report doesn't seem to care so much about, hurting our ranking further as the ranking methodology only takes into account certain (fairly U.S.-centric) academic and honor societies.
Finally, Case focuses on giving students varied experiences such as co-ops, internships, research positions, and alternative sources of credit. These options greatly increase the value (both educational and resume-related) of a degree, but they do take longer. As a result, our average graduation time is longer, knocking us further down the list.
To quote Wikipedia (sorry, the original source is not available online, and I don't feel like hunting through NYT archives to find it):
A New York Times article reported that, given the U.S. News weighting methodology, "it's easy to guess who's going to end up on top: Harvard, Yale and Princeton round out the first three essentially every year. In fact, when asked how he knew his system was sound, Mel Elfin, the rankings' founder, often answered that he knew it because those three schools always landed on top. When a new lead statistician, Amy Graham, changed the formula in 1999 to what she considered more statistically valid, the California Institute of Technology jumped to first place. Ms. Graham soon left, and a slightly modified system pushed Princeton back to No. 1 the next year."
Perhaps... perhaps not. Given that character portrayal / character development is so critical to the Final Fantasy series, I think one of the best ways to compare the games is by looking at this aspect (and focusing on the protagonists... I'll leave the Kuja vs. Kefka vs. Sephiroth debate for another thread). I'm deliberately ignoring everything from graphics to soundtrack to battle mechanics, but I think it's an interesting comparison nonetheless. I threw this together a while ago, so I figured I'd dredge it up for this occasion.
Behold, a review of the characters and character portrayal in each (real) Final Fantasy!
FF I -- 0/5 - Your characters don't really have... "characters". Personality had not yet been invented. I still love the game.
FF II -- * To be honest... I never played this one.
FF III -- 2.5/5 - Even without individualized personalities, both PCs and NPCs manage to come off as quite lovable and entertaining in this NES classic, though it gets awkward when Princess Sarah expresses her love for you... er... all of you.
FF IV -- 2/5 - Each character now has a specific personality, but these personalities tend to be more stereotypes than actual characters-with-dimension: I'm a bad guy! Rarrr!... I'm a good guy! *holy*... I'm his wife! *swoon*... etc.
FF V -- 3/5 - Similar style to FF IV, but a definite improvement. This is the earliest FF with real individualized character attachment (who doesn't love Galuf?), and the game really plays on this. The enhanced dialogue and translation in FF V Advance would give the game another half point, in my opinion.
FF VI -- 5/5 - A slew of characters are presented, but this doesn't stop the game from giving each one a back story, personality, and room for growth. The myriad side-quests let you explore more of every character if you so desire, and the well-written dialog (no more "You spoony bard!") is a plus. Also, Final Fantasy's tradition of leitmotifs and variations arguably reached its pinnacle in FF VI (despite being pre-MIDI), being used to supplement the limited on-screen portrayals of personality and emotion.
FF VII -- 3/5 - Fewer playable characters are in this game, but, somehow, they are not as well done as those in FF VI. Though the characters are developed more, they also seem to grow less. It feels like character development just halts as everyone is waiting for Aeris to come back or something.
FF VIII-- 1/5 - Beginning of game: I'm emo, I'm goth, I'm a punk. *whine*...... End of game: I'm emo, I'm goth, I'm a punk. *sigh* [When I was 15, I had a crush on Rinoa, though. Looking back, I can't see where that came from]
FF IX -- 5/5 - An excellent combination of VII's character scheme with VI's character development. Good guys and bad guys and the rest cover every available character niche, and even move between them as the story progresses. People lose their naivete, power corrupts, the lonely find family, etc. etc. etc. This game focuses more on the characters in your party than the world around them, and does it well.
FF X -- 4/5 - Similar to FF VII, but with a bit more simulated character growth. That, and Wakka is debatably the best FF character, ever.
FF XI -- NaN/5 - This game does not exist. Heathens!
FF XII -- 3/5 - Unfortunately, Vaan just seems to get stupider as the game goes on. Other than that, Balthier rivals Wakka in many ways, and you do kind of get worried that Ashe just wants to rule the world. Some of the most *interesting* characters come from this game, but there is nary a side quest to develop them further. Sadly, all the side quests were converted from miniature storylines to MMO style grinds and runs.
Funny story about that... I actually was launching this comprehensive faith/history/doctrine/etc. research case to convert *her* to Roman Catholicism. I needed un-biased information about both churches' doctrine to make a fair comparison and show her that my side made more sense [I was interested in studying law at one point], so I went behind her back and started researching the "Mormons", questioning church members, and grilling the missionaries on what they believe.
... call me a lousy debater (IANAL, after all) but I ended up converting myself based on all my research.
It was the beginning of a long process, and one that is still continuing. In the end, though, I have to say... I did it for me.
Yes, the mormons have many of these attributes, but Scientology takes these to a whole new extreme.
I certainly agree with your complaints against Scientology, but I definitely have a beef with the first half of your sentence, there. I'm a recent (a few years back) convert, so I have seen the Mormons from both the outside and the inside. Let me break this down point by point, as I see some of these misconceptions come up quite a bit:
1) a clear bias towards profit.
The LDS ("Mormon") Church does urge its members to pay a tithe of their income, however the money does not go to higher-ups within the church leadership. In fact, we have one of the few layperson priesthoods and layperson leaderships among all religions in the world. What that means is that the leaders of congregations, the missionaries, the teachers, and up the ladder are volunteer (i.e. unpaid) positions--absolutely no monetary profit involved. The tithing instead goes to maintaining church buildings, production/distribution of materials, education, and (the greatest portion) charity work. (The LDS Church, despite being numerically smaller than many other religions, donated some of the largest portions of food, supplies, funds, and labor to various recent disaster sites over the last decade.)
2) Membership policies that serve to isolate its mebership from external influence.
I can't say I see where this one is coming from, either. Though the church does host plenty of social events for various age groups, attendance is certainly not mandatory. I've never felt pressure to change my group of associates or close contacts... if anything, I've become closer to my family (who are not members), upon learning more of the importance that the church places on families. If you are referring to the odd culture of Utah-Mormons, that's a totally different story of odd cultural quirks arising from a largely homogenous group of people in a small area; however the majority of Mormons in the U.S. do not live in Utah, and the majority of Mormons in the world do not even live in the U.S.
3) Extreme polices of secrecy and nondisclosure.
Now this one I hear a lot, and I assume it relates to our Temple ceremonies, as we certainly try extremely hard to distribute all of our scripture and doctrine as far and as wide (and as free) as we can. Also, all of our semi-annual conferences when the Prophet and other leaders speak (the largest and most important church gatherings) are broadcast over satellite and the internet, and are printed and available through various sources. We don't discuss the temple ceremonies because they are highly symbolic and of a sacred and individual nature to us (we believe that personal revelation is critically involved)--but there is something critical about this that I want to point out... notice what I said, that we distribute "all of our scripture and doctrine". There is no new law or doctrine or secret that comes out in the temple ceremonies that hasn't been taught in so many ways so many times throughout scripture. There's nothing comparable to Scientology's holding back of the darkest secrets until you are too deep and too invested to turn around, as in their OT III texts.
4) General skirting social norms and laws, such as child labor, marriage/sexuality, contracts, finance, education, etc.
I'm not so certain where you are going with this one... Our views on marriage/sexuality may be more traditional than most modern society (If you are referring to polygamy, it has been illegal in the church for over a hundred years. If you are interested in more information about how the polygamy is involved with the church's history, here is a 65 page historical paper on the subject by a Mormon M.D., with hundreds of cited historical references... or a
Oddly enough, "direct line of sight" actually decreases the data rate of MIMO (multiple-input multiple-output) systems like HSPA. As MIMO uses the multiple physical wireless channels created by obstructions and reflections between a set of antennas at both transmitter and receiver to increase the bandwidth, a perfectly clear path hurts your data rate. Unless there are obstacles to bounce the signal around a bit, you only get one physical channel, as the path between any pair of antennas is essentially the same.
In practice, such pure physical channels usually only appear out in the open countryside--and besides, if you are referring to AT&T's EDGE or non-HSPA 3G, then it isn't MIMO... just crappy AT&T.
I assumed you were referencing "i" and "iii", having never heard the slang "petard" == "bollocks". Referring to the first and third, however, the phrase "hoist by one's own petard" originally comes from the image of a soldier's own explosive going off too early, thus sending them airborne... or a French slang for flatulence.
In either case, it does not seem to be the sort of thing one would wish to seize... but rather avoid. It seems to me that grabbing a hold of someone's failed plan (or flatulence?) would give you little influence over them.
3) If this box was there for 2 months, it must be drawing power from the car battery. Doesn't that make it a lot easier to detect? Doesn't that also mean that it is probably only working when the car ignition is on?
Your average car battery has about 60 Ah (ampere-hours) of capacity, and is recharged every time you drive your car. In comparison, the GPS tracker probably only uses around a hundred mA (miliamperes) of current to read the GPS signal and report your location, something which it will only do in occasional, brief pulses, lasting only seconds and occurring once every few minutes. As a result, even if you didn't drive your car for an entire week, this device would drain less than 1 % of your battery's capacity. [Considering how much the capacity of a lead-acid battery varies based upon environment, charging, use, etc., this is pretty much impossible to detect.]
4) GPS signals from satellites are low-power, therefore they must be easy to jam. Isn't there a potential market for devices that do just that? You probably only need to jam the signal when the ignition is on. Better yet, transmit false GPS data and really mess with the cops' minds.
There are two parts to the GPS tracker. First, the receiver which watches the publicly available GPS signals from the GPS satellites and calculates your position. Secondly, a cellular-style device which radios your current location via normal cellular channels to the police. Jamming the first would mean blanketing the area around you with noise of the right frequency to smother the normal GPS satellite signals. Because the satellite transmissions are quite low power, you would also be destroying the reception of any nearby (in a fairly decent radius) navigation devices, GPS phones, etc. Jamming the second would be even more difficult, involving blanketing all sorts of cellular channels with noise, preventing any cell phones, 3G internet connections, etc. from being used anywhere around you.
Of course, both of the above are quite illegal due to their disruptive effects by FTC regulations in the USA.
As far as spoofing the GPS data? That would be quite the interesting technical challenge... I can't comment on that one.
The field to which the GP was referring is known as Number Theory, and some of its component studies are most certainly dependent upon the numbers (i.e. base, definition of integer, etc.) that is used.
Subtext being that this WowPod is basically a diorama of slightly higher quality than that of a 5th grader but is deemed newsworthy by being contexted with World of Warcraft and having been done by MIT students.
... and having an integrated data reader, intelligent cooking system, servo-controlled cooking apparatus, software tie-ins, and even simulated avatar interaction. (See the original blog for details, rather than the blog-about-a-blog in the summary)
True, it's no PhD thesis, but it is inventive and amusing, and a nice brief distraction during the workday. Whether it belongs in Idle or not is up to the editors, but I was entertained.
So really, you can argue that this is how the games were meant to be seen like this, and this is actually how it should look.
I agree fully. I used to play plenty of these old games on a CRT, and I remember the ghostly flickering of Pac Man's ghosts (but not Pac Man himself!), the "bullet trails" in Combat, and the importance of the CRT's color shading to backgrounds in Air-Sea-Battle, Yar's Revenge, and plenty of others.
There is an analogue on the NES: the system's sprite limit. Due to some limitations in the NES, the system could only display so many moving sprites in a horizontal field--too many would cause some sprites to flicker or to disappear outright. Some games took advantage of this bug/feature to create flickering effects or calculated slow-downs. These effects, of course, did not show up in early emulators, leaving a mess of extra sprites on the screen that weren't intended to be visible. Later NES emulators added an option for restoring the original system's sprite limit, making games once again look as they were intended to look.
If you're going for unfinished business in video games, I don't think you can find examples more extreme than KotOR II (Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II). Huge swaths of game-land (including at least one additional planet) were programmed and hundreds of lines of voice-acted dialogue were recorded, only to be removed before the game's release. The entire ending planet/sequence was scrapped and replaced with an anti-climactic, confusing hodge-podge of fights.
Interestingly enough, the raw resources and recorded lines are still on the commercial CD's, just not accessible in-game. As a result, these guys (as well as a few other teams) are working to re-implement as much of the original material as possible. The project is slow going (> 4 years), as--in addition to being comprised largely of college students--the mod team is seeking to release a nearly bug-free final product. They just released a First Release Candidate to their beta testers this past Saturday, however, so hope has been rekindled in the community!
Slashdot Mirror
I can never find the home or end keys!
I discovered the Microsoft Multimedia Keyboard (that has since been generally discontinued, of course) which did shuffle around Home/End/Delete/P.up/P.down, etc., but did so in an entirely logical manner... at least for Windows usage. I wouldn't use it for editing in UNIX, but it matches the function of Windows text editors quite well. [It also compresses the horizontal width of the keyboard, moving in the numpad and arrow keys, thus making all key accesses somewhat easier for small hands.]
Instead of being a 3 column x 2 row 6 button layout, it is a 2 column x 3 row layout with an oversize Delete button (Insert got kicked off, which is fine by me given how rarely I actually use it). First off, this puts all the buttons in better reach of my small hands, and significantly increases the ease of hitting "Delete". (No, I haven't had a problem with accidental deletes, either).
Also, Home and End sit horizontally adjacent which is much more intuitive than the usual vertical layout given their far left/far right operation in Windows text editors. Page Up and Page Down remain vertically adjacent in the right column of the rectangle, as befits their operation.
All in all, I've found it to be a wonderfully comfortable keyboard, especially as it is missing the extra keys that often appear around the cursor arrows. They made the annoying move of giving the function keys odd shortcut abilities, but a single keypress (that is remembered by the keyboard, so it persists even during computer power-off) restores their normal functions. The "bonus" buttons along the top edge are completely customizable (I have them linked to things like Firefox, Gmail, iTunes, etc.) and more than make up for the function-key oddness.
i suspect this is likely the case with most people who are able to type at any reasonable pace.
I have tiny hands, you insensitive clod!
Honestly, though, I do have fingers that are short enough that is uncomfortable for me to hold down the shift key while trying to type more than a few capital letters at a time. For me, adding two key presses to an all-capitals header that I am including in function comments is much more efficient than either typing the whole thing at half speed because I can barely reach the needed keys or switching back and forth between shift keys every few characters.
geoip_city()... I think I may have been there once or twice.
This wireless charging/powering is by no means a new technique. My masters thesis included plenty of material and research on this topic, and I was referencing papers on wireless powering for implants as far back as the 70's. The class-E amplifier driving an inductive coil resonantly tuned with a receiving coil is the standard architecture used by decades.
I'm confused at the submitter's hailing 'resonant coupling' as a (seemingly) recent advance, as resonant coupling is simply what happens whenever a tuned transmitter and receiver antenna communicate. In communications devices, the tuning is broad so that the receiver takes in a wide range of frequencies which are filtered out down the line. In power transmission devices, the tuning is much more narrow, as only a single frequency (the power wave) is transmitted.
Ironically, [please tell me I've used that word correctly] what makes wireless powering and charging more feasible today than 20 years ago is not an improvement in the electromagnetic theory of wireless power. Rather, it is a combination of a reduction in the power requirements of the receiving device due to advances in low-power electronics, as well as an improvement in evolution-based software which can simulate and design better and better directed antennas--something which by-hand design has never been able to do. All in all, though, it's a nice demo but isn't much in the way of new and useful science.
what happens if you place a HDD, or your phone contains a HDD and is charged using this method, wont the magnetic field damage the magnetic media??
Most HDD's are pretty well shielded, nowadays. Remember also that the receiving coil (in this case) is a 707 cm^2 wire coil, while the surface area of the hard drive in the magnetic field is likely no more than a few cm^2. (The energy absorbed by an object in this situation is proportional to its surface area in the plane perpendicular to the electric field, among other things.)
does the power consumption increase or decrease based on the number of receiving coils??
The power consumption in the primary would increase. Given the case of two coupled inductors (the two coils seen here), a mutual inductance couples the two and a "reflected impedance" is seen on each of them due to the effect of the other. In other words, if the receiving coil was consuming large amounts of power, a significant series load would appear on the transmitting coil, causing either a drop in the voltage and the transmitted power (if you hold the power consumed by the transmitting coil constant) or an increase in the consumed power (if you hold the transmitted power constant).
Pandemics are indiscriminate and take down rich, poor, black, brown, yellow, red, white, gay, straight, Jew, Gentile, Atheist, young and old.
I invite you to study the sad statistics of one of our current pandemics, AIDS, especially as it affects Africa.
Claiming that a pandemic will equally cull the ranks of rich and poor alike shows a very limited understanding of modern health care issues.
I'd like to point out, however, that not once in the article are the words "supernova", "nova", "explode", "boom", etc. ever mentioned. One sentence from the article reads as follows:
This could be a sign of a long-term oscillation in its size or the star's first death knells.
after which the rest of the article goes on to discuss much less spectacular but no less interesting causes of the change in luminosity (pulsations, instabilities, a potato-shaped star that is turning such that the narrow axis is perpendicular to our line of sight, etc.).
A tad sensationalist of a headline for what is a perfectly cromulent NewScientist article.
I am impressed.
I don't suppose you took pictures? (Or know anywhere to find them?)
Have you heard of oodaloop syndrome? It's where you get sick of every personality quirk being called a syndrome.
Because oftentimes, it's more than just a personality quirk.
Taking the implied example of Asperger Syndrome... We know some geeks have recently taken to self-diagnosing Asperger's and using it as an odd badge of honor, but that shouldn't undermine the seriousness of the actual condition. Asperger's can manifest itself as a devastating condition where one even has difficulty engaging in conversation [not your run-of-the-mill awkwardness--imagine someone speaking to you and you hearing their words but not having a clue what they are actually saying], difficulty living in close proximity to others [something like an 80% divorce rate has been observed for those who actually progress far enough to get married], and a significantly increased risk of developing other psychiatric conditions [anxiety disorder, major depressive disorder, etc.].
Asperger's (and other syndromes) have labels so that professionals can provide essential and targeted therapy to the underlying cause, rather than just trying to treat symptoms. You cannot treat (for example) the social awkwardness caused by Pervasive Developmental Disorders (such as Asperger's) the same way you would treat social awkwardness due to a phobia, an anxiety disorder, or childhood trauma. Each condition has a label because each has a unique cause rooted somewhere in our so-complex-they-can't-understand-themselves brains, and effective therapy occurs when each cause is dealt with separately.
I think wasting 24 hours, going through airport security multiple times, sitting in an uncomfortable stuffy hot screamy cabin for 8+ hours, all the waste and waiting and bullshit and potential delays, all in order to attend a 1 hour meeting is the height of byzantine ridiculousness.
I like my version, better, given a few recent business trips down to San Diego and back:
--Relax at the airport after a long day of work with a good book and some airport food (on the company card) for an hour before the flight,
--Catch up on some sleep/reading/old Scrapheap Challenge episodes for 2 hours in the air
--Spend the night in comfort in a nicely kept hotel, maybe do some pedestrian sightseeing in the meantime
--Enjoy free soaps and shampoos followed by a continental breakfast along with said book
--Cram a month's worth of discussion into a day of face-to-face meetings, with a team lunch thrown in for good measure
--Resume earlier enjoyment of book, sleep, media, or games at the airport and on the flight home.
Yeah, you can end up being elbowed for half the flight, stuck in security for what seems like an eternity, or simply lost in your destination city, but the experience of travel is extremely dependent on your mindset. I've run into all sorts of problems and hassles while traveling (Was stranded in Houston for 10 hours without my luggage, once... almost didn't make it through customs due to nitpicking another time), but traveling on my own has always been a positive experience for me.
There are just way too many factors to take into account, and personal preference should guide the decision, not the weird criterion that US News & World Report uses.
I agree fully. I attended Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. Despite receiving some ~80% of the federal research money that flows into Ohio (even competing with places like OSU, which has ten times as many students), our engineering programs have been slipping in US News &c's rankings.
Why?
Well, one of the categories that figures in to the rankings is first-year retention rate. In other universities in Ohio (such as OSU) freshmen spend the first year on general education requirements. At Case, however, freshmen start on major engineering prerequisites, with the general education requirements sprinkled on the side throughout the college experience. (This allows students to choose to take all sorts of classes with significant prerequisite requirements later in their college careers--we are a research university, after all.) However, as the engineering prerequisites are more difficult than yon gen-ed requirements, our first-year retention rate drops slightly due to the students who realize right off the bat that calculus and physics aren't their cup of tea.
On top of that, Case hires expert faculty from around the world. This means, however, that the faculty may receive honors or be members of international professional/academic societies that U.S. News & World Report doesn't seem to care so much about, hurting our ranking further as the ranking methodology only takes into account certain (fairly U.S.-centric) academic and honor societies.
Finally, Case focuses on giving students varied experiences such as co-ops, internships, research positions, and alternative sources of credit. These options greatly increase the value (both educational and resume-related) of a degree, but they do take longer. As a result, our average graduation time is longer, knocking us further down the list.
To quote Wikipedia (sorry, the original source is not available online, and I don't feel like hunting through NYT archives to find it):
A New York Times article reported that, given the U.S. News weighting methodology, "it's easy to guess who's going to end up on top: Harvard, Yale and Princeton round out the first three essentially every year. In fact, when asked how he knew his system was sound, Mel Elfin, the rankings' founder, often answered that he knew it because those three schools always landed on top. When a new lead statistician, Amy Graham, changed the formula in 1999 to what she considered more statistically valid, the California Institute of Technology jumped to first place. Ms. Graham soon left, and a slightly modified system pushed Princeton back to No. 1 the next year."
Perhaps... perhaps not. Given that character portrayal / character development is so critical to the Final Fantasy series, I think one of the best ways to compare the games is by looking at this aspect (and focusing on the protagonists... I'll leave the Kuja vs. Kefka vs. Sephiroth debate for another thread). I'm deliberately ignoring everything from graphics to soundtrack to battle mechanics, but I think it's an interesting comparison nonetheless. I threw this together a while ago, so I figured I'd dredge it up for this occasion.
... er... all of you.
... I'm a good guy! *holy* ... I'm his wife! *swoon* ... etc.
... ... End of game: I'm emo, I'm goth, I'm a punk. *sigh*
Behold, a review of the characters and character portrayal in each (real) Final Fantasy!
FF I -- 0/5 - Your characters don't really have... "characters". Personality had not yet been invented. I still love the game.
FF II -- * To be honest... I never played this one.
FF III -- 2.5/5 - Even without individualized personalities, both PCs and NPCs manage to come off as quite lovable and entertaining in this NES classic, though it gets awkward when Princess Sarah expresses her love for you
FF IV -- 2/5 - Each character now has a specific personality, but these personalities tend to be more stereotypes than actual characters-with-dimension: I'm a bad guy! Rarrr!
FF V -- 3/5 - Similar style to FF IV, but a definite improvement. This is the earliest FF with real individualized character attachment (who doesn't love Galuf?), and the game really plays on this. The enhanced dialogue and translation in FF V Advance would give the game another half point, in my opinion.
FF VI -- 5/5 - A slew of characters are presented, but this doesn't stop the game from giving each one a back story, personality, and room for growth. The myriad side-quests let you explore more of every character if you so desire, and the well-written dialog (no more "You spoony bard!") is a plus. Also, Final Fantasy's tradition of leitmotifs and variations arguably reached its pinnacle in FF VI (despite being pre-MIDI), being used to supplement the limited on-screen portrayals of personality and emotion.
FF VII -- 3/5 - Fewer playable characters are in this game, but, somehow, they are not as well done as those in FF VI. Though the characters are developed more, they also seem to grow less. It feels like character development just halts as everyone is waiting for Aeris to come back or something.
FF VIII-- 1/5 - Beginning of game: I'm emo, I'm goth, I'm a punk. *whine*
[When I was 15, I had a crush on Rinoa, though. Looking back, I can't see where that came from]
FF IX -- 5/5 - An excellent combination of VII's character scheme with VI's character development. Good guys and bad guys and the rest cover every available character niche, and even move between them as the story progresses. People lose their naivete, power corrupts, the lonely find family, etc. etc. etc. This game focuses more on the characters in your party than the world around them, and does it well.
FF X -- 4/5 - Similar to FF VII, but with a bit more simulated character growth. That, and Wakka is debatably the best FF character, ever.
FF XI -- NaN/5 - This game does not exist. Heathens!
FF XII -- 3/5 - Unfortunately, Vaan just seems to get stupider as the game goes on. Other than that, Balthier rivals Wakka in many ways, and you do kind of get worried that Ashe just wants to rule the world. Some of the most *interesting* characters come from this game, but there is nary a side quest to develop them further. Sadly, all the side quests were converted from miniature storylines to MMO style grinds and runs.
And there you have it!
Discuss.
lol. I hope she's worth it.
Funny story about that... I actually was launching this comprehensive faith/history/doctrine/etc. research case to convert *her* to Roman Catholicism. I needed un-biased information about both churches' doctrine to make a fair comparison and show her that my side made more sense [I was interested in studying law at one point], so I went behind her back and started researching the "Mormons", questioning church members, and grilling the missionaries on what they believe.
... call me a lousy debater (IANAL, after all) but I ended up converting myself based on all my research.
It was the beginning of a long process, and one that is still continuing. In the end, though, I have to say... I did it for me.
Yes, the mormons have many of these attributes, but Scientology takes these to a whole new extreme.
I certainly agree with your complaints against Scientology, but I definitely have a beef with the first half of your sentence, there. I'm a recent (a few years back) convert, so I have seen the Mormons from both the outside and the inside. Let me break this down point by point, as I see some of these misconceptions come up quite a bit:
1) a clear bias towards profit.
The LDS ("Mormon") Church does urge its members to pay a tithe of their income, however the money does not go to higher-ups within the church leadership. In fact, we have one of the few layperson priesthoods and layperson leaderships among all religions in the world. What that means is that the leaders of congregations, the missionaries, the teachers, and up the ladder are volunteer (i.e. unpaid) positions--absolutely no monetary profit involved. The tithing instead goes to maintaining church buildings, production/distribution of materials, education, and (the greatest portion) charity work. (The LDS Church, despite being numerically smaller than many other religions, donated some of the largest portions of food, supplies, funds, and labor to various recent disaster sites over the last decade.)
2) Membership policies that serve to isolate its mebership from external influence.
I can't say I see where this one is coming from, either. Though the church does host plenty of social events for various age groups, attendance is certainly not mandatory. I've never felt pressure to change my group of associates or close contacts... if anything, I've become closer to my family (who are not members), upon learning more of the importance that the church places on families. If you are referring to the odd culture of Utah-Mormons, that's a totally different story of odd cultural quirks arising from a largely homogenous group of people in a small area; however the majority of Mormons in the U.S. do not live in Utah, and the majority of Mormons in the world do not even live in the U.S.
3) Extreme polices of secrecy and nondisclosure.
Now this one I hear a lot, and I assume it relates to our Temple ceremonies, as we certainly try extremely hard to distribute all of our scripture and doctrine as far and as wide (and as free) as we can. Also, all of our semi-annual conferences when the Prophet and other leaders speak (the largest and most important church gatherings) are broadcast over satellite and the internet, and are printed and available through various sources. We don't discuss the temple ceremonies because they are highly symbolic and of a sacred and individual nature to us (we believe that personal revelation is critically involved)--but there is something critical about this that I want to point out... notice what I said, that we distribute "all of our scripture and doctrine". There is no new law or doctrine or secret that comes out in the temple ceremonies that hasn't been taught in so many ways so many times throughout scripture. There's nothing comparable to Scientology's holding back of the darkest secrets until you are too deep and too invested to turn around, as in their OT III texts.
4) General skirting social norms and laws, such as child labor, marriage/sexuality, contracts, finance, education, etc.
I'm not so certain where you are going with this one... Our views on marriage/sexuality may be more traditional than most modern society (If you are referring to polygamy, it has been illegal in the church for over a hundred years. If you are interested in more information about how the polygamy is involved with the church's history, here is a 65 page historical paper on the subject by a Mormon M.D., with hundreds of cited historical references... or a
Oddly enough, "direct line of sight" actually decreases the data rate of MIMO (multiple-input multiple-output) systems like HSPA. As MIMO uses the multiple physical wireless channels created by obstructions and reflections between a set of antennas at both transmitter and receiver to increase the bandwidth, a perfectly clear path hurts your data rate. Unless there are obstacles to bounce the signal around a bit, you only get one physical channel, as the path between any pair of antennas is essentially the same.
In practice, such pure physical channels usually only appear out in the open countryside--and besides, if you are referring to AT&T's EDGE or non-HSPA 3G, then it isn't MIMO... just crappy AT&T.
But it's nice to know, isn't it?
I see...
I assumed you were referencing "i" and "iii", having never heard the slang "petard" == "bollocks". Referring to the first and third, however, the phrase "hoist by one's own petard" originally comes from the image of a soldier's own explosive going off too early, thus sending them airborne... or a French slang for flatulence.
In either case, it does not seem to be the sort of thing one would wish to seize... but rather avoid. It seems to me that grabbing a hold of someone's failed plan (or flatulence?) would give you little influence over them.
you've got them by their own petards
I... um... ...
I don't think that means what you think it means.
3) If this box was there for 2 months, it must be drawing power from the car battery. Doesn't that make it a lot easier to detect? Doesn't that also mean that it is probably only working when the car ignition is on?
Your average car battery has about 60 Ah (ampere-hours) of capacity, and is recharged every time you drive your car. In comparison, the GPS tracker probably only uses around a hundred mA (miliamperes) of current to read the GPS signal and report your location, something which it will only do in occasional, brief pulses, lasting only seconds and occurring once every few minutes. As a result, even if you didn't drive your car for an entire week, this device would drain less than 1 % of your battery's capacity. [Considering how much the capacity of a lead-acid battery varies based upon environment, charging, use, etc., this is pretty much impossible to detect.]
4) GPS signals from satellites are low-power, therefore they must be easy to jam. Isn't there a potential market for devices that do just that? You probably only need to jam the signal when the ignition is on. Better yet, transmit false GPS data and really mess with the cops' minds.
There are two parts to the GPS tracker. First, the receiver which watches the publicly available GPS signals from the GPS satellites and calculates your position. Secondly, a cellular-style device which radios your current location via normal cellular channels to the police. Jamming the first would mean blanketing the area around you with noise of the right frequency to smother the normal GPS satellite signals. Because the satellite transmissions are quite low power, you would also be destroying the reception of any nearby (in a fairly decent radius) navigation devices, GPS phones, etc. Jamming the second would be even more difficult, involving blanketing all sorts of cellular channels with noise, preventing any cell phones, 3G internet connections, etc. from being used anywhere around you.
Of course, both of the above are quite illegal due to their disruptive effects by FTC regulations in the USA.
As far as spoofing the GPS data? That would be quite the interesting technical challenge... I can't comment on that one.
The field to which the GP was referring is known as Number Theory, and some of its component studies are most certainly dependent upon the numbers (i.e. base, definition of integer, etc.) that is used.
Subtext being that this WowPod is basically a diorama of slightly higher quality than that of a 5th grader but is deemed newsworthy by being contexted with World of Warcraft and having been done by MIT students.
... and having an integrated data reader, intelligent cooking system, servo-controlled cooking apparatus, software tie-ins, and even simulated avatar interaction. (See the original blog for details, rather than the blog-about-a-blog in the summary)
True, it's no PhD thesis, but it is inventive and amusing, and a nice brief distraction during the workday. Whether it belongs in Idle or not is up to the editors, but I was entertained.
So really, you can argue that this is how the games were meant to be seen like this, and this is actually how it should look.
I agree fully. I used to play plenty of these old games on a CRT, and I remember the ghostly flickering of Pac Man's ghosts (but not Pac Man himself!), the "bullet trails" in Combat, and the importance of the CRT's color shading to backgrounds in Air-Sea-Battle, Yar's Revenge, and plenty of others.
There is an analogue on the NES: the system's sprite limit. Due to some limitations in the NES, the system could only display so many moving sprites in a horizontal field--too many would cause some sprites to flicker or to disappear outright. Some games took advantage of this bug/feature to create flickering effects or calculated slow-downs. These effects, of course, did not show up in early emulators, leaving a mess of extra sprites on the screen that weren't intended to be visible. Later NES emulators added an option for restoring the original system's sprite limit, making games once again look as they were intended to look.
The name "VORTEX2" stands for "Verification of Rotation in Tornadoes EXperiment 2".
;-)
Now, I may be mistaken, but I am fairly certain that it has been quite solidly verified that tornadoes do, in fact rotate.
... and this is the second time they've spend ~$10 million to figure that out.
If you're going for unfinished business in video games, I don't think you can find examples more extreme than KotOR II (Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II). Huge swaths of game-land (including at least one additional planet) were programmed and hundreds of lines of voice-acted dialogue were recorded, only to be removed before the game's release. The entire ending planet/sequence was scrapped and replaced with an anti-climactic, confusing hodge-podge of fights.
Interestingly enough, the raw resources and recorded lines are still on the commercial CD's, just not accessible in-game. As a result, these guys (as well as a few other teams) are working to re-implement as much of the original material as possible. The project is slow going (> 4 years), as--in addition to being comprised largely of college students--the mod team is seeking to release a nearly bug-free final product. They just released a First Release Candidate to their beta testers this past Saturday, however, so hope has been rekindled in the community!
it's the sparks from the flint in their toilet paper
I take it you have buns of steel, then?
Sharks?
That's so Meme 1.0.
Get with the 2.0 picture, man... it's all about sharkfalcons.
Crocoeagles still scare the crap out of me, though.