The Skeptic's Annotated Quran abbreviates the long, flowery language of the Quran into more legible, easily digestible form. Thus it is not strictly verbatim, but it IS a valid translation. It is NOT a commentary, nor is it a distortion of the content of the Quran. For example:
Qur'an says:
As for the Disbelievers, Whether thou warn them or thou warn them not it is all one for them; they believe not. Allah hath sealed their hearing and their hearts, and on their eyes there is a covering. Theirs will be an awful doom.
The text in the video (and SAQ) is:
Don't bother to warn the disbelievers. Allah has blinded them. Theirs will be an awful doom
The meaning is the same. I point this out because I do say in my video I used the text taken directly from the Qur'an, where in fact I used the text from the SAQ, but I still stand by the fact that this video shows 'Islamic Teachings: Cruelty From The Qur'an'
In one of my earlier high school science classes, I was in a class competition. The goal was to keep a beaker of water as hot as possible overnight, with the water starting at some rather high temperature like 80 degrees Celsius or something. The devices had to be no bigger than a certain volume (ours was a cube about 20cm on a side) and had to be completely self-contained, but it could use whatever means necessary to have the water end up at highest possible temperature.
My team of four were in the "hot" competition. Most of the teams just used various kinds of insulation, but we decided to also have an electric heating solution as well. Our final design had two 'D' batteries stacked in each of the corners of the box, connected in a circuit with a heating coil to be placed in the beaker of water. My most significant contribution was the idea of using a spring from a pen as the heating coil instead of whatever other wire we were using, because it had a much higher resistance. We then had various kinds of insulation like styrofoam and the expanding kind that comes out of an aerosol can, plus tin foil directly next to the beaker to reflect the heat back.
We ended up with the highest temperature water in the class, though our heating system had stopped functioning by the morning. We figured that the beaker must have boiled over and shorted the circuit, but it may be that the batteries just ran out.
Also notable was the team that came in second place: they had a somewhat scary design that heated the water through a chemical reaction which, although I forget the details, I know involved bleach.
"couldn't they just have moved "home destination" by shifting
it around a bit instead of cuttiny legs off the pests ?"
Moving home to somewhere closer or further away does nothing to determine their method of navigation. Even if you put them on a treadmill, they could be using an internal clock or "how tired they get" (?) to determine when they've gone far enough. The only way to narrow it down to a pedometer is to make each of their strides take them a different distance than they are used to.
The article claims a vague "millions" of dollars at stake, but I'd be interested to know the actual numbers: I know that when I find myself at one of these pages, I am least likely to click on an ad.
Am I the only one
on
Web 3.0
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
...who's heard way more backlash against Web 2.0 hype than actual Web 2.0 hype?
When I go to the supermarket and purchase a pound of ground beef, I am remotely operating the captive bolt gun used to kill another cow to replace the meat that I'm taking. Instead of a flash game or whatever the site from the article uses, my interface is the interac machine. Auto-aiming is turned on.
At the same time, the desensitization is a bit of a different issue in the case of internet hunting because presumably the "hunter" is at least partially motivated by a desire to kill something, whereas for the consumer at the supermarket this is usually an irrelevant side effect.
There's a lot more to being a bee than flying really well, though. It has to know all about finding food, communicating with other bees, defending itself, building honeycombs, etc.
Any worthwhile "bee" turing test would require that the robot be able to integrate seamlessly into a hive. While building a bee robot/AI that can fool a human under close inspection (even of behaviour alone) is still an enormously complex task, it doesn't necessarily have anything to do with what being a bee is actually like.
Slashdot Mirror
+1 Venomous
...we need Whuffie.
This is what Nick Gisburne's video response page says in the sidebar:
IMPORTANT NOTE
You may be picked up on this if you don't read the following. The quotes I used are taken from this page:
http://www.skepticsannotatedbible.com/quran/cruelt y/long.html
The Skeptic's Annotated Quran abbreviates the long, flowery language of the Quran into more legible, easily digestible form. Thus it is not strictly verbatim, but it IS a valid translation. It is NOT a commentary, nor is it a distortion of the content of the Quran. For example:
Qur'an says:
As for the Disbelievers, Whether thou warn them or thou warn them not it is all one for them; they believe not. Allah hath sealed their hearing and their hearts, and on their eyes there is a covering. Theirs will be an awful doom.
The text in the video (and SAQ) is:
Don't bother to warn the disbelievers. Allah has blinded them. Theirs will be an awful doom
The meaning is the same. I point this out because I do say in my video I used the text taken directly from the Qur'an, where in fact I used the text from the SAQ, but I still stand by the fact that this video shows 'Islamic Teachings: Cruelty From The Qur'an'
Wait, is that .25 cents or 25 cents? You don't happen to work for Verizon, do you?
In one of my earlier high school science classes, I was in a class competition. The goal was to keep a beaker of water as hot as possible overnight, with the water starting at some rather high temperature like 80 degrees Celsius or something. The devices had to be no bigger than a certain volume (ours was a cube about 20cm on a side) and had to be completely self-contained, but it could use whatever means necessary to have the water end up at highest possible temperature. My team of four were in the "hot" competition. Most of the teams just used various kinds of insulation, but we decided to also have an electric heating solution as well. Our final design had two 'D' batteries stacked in each of the corners of the box, connected in a circuit with a heating coil to be placed in the beaker of water. My most significant contribution was the idea of using a spring from a pen as the heating coil instead of whatever other wire we were using, because it had a much higher resistance. We then had various kinds of insulation like styrofoam and the expanding kind that comes out of an aerosol can, plus tin foil directly next to the beaker to reflect the heat back. We ended up with the highest temperature water in the class, though our heating system had stopped functioning by the morning. We figured that the beaker must have boiled over and shorted the circuit, but it may be that the batteries just ran out. Also notable was the team that came in second place: they had a somewhat scary design that heated the water through a chemical reaction which, although I forget the details, I know involved bleach.
This is mentioned in the article in parent's post:
http://pine.fm/LearnToProgram/
I'm going to give this to my niece when she's a bit older.
Ignore the AC. Luminesweeper looks great and I'm going to have to download it now :)
"couldn't they just have moved "home destination" by shifting it around a bit instead of cuttiny legs off the pests ?" Moving home to somewhere closer or further away does nothing to determine their method of navigation. Even if you put them on a treadmill, they could be using an internal clock or "how tired they get" (?) to determine when they've gone far enough. The only way to narrow it down to a pedometer is to make each of their strides take them a different distance than they are used to.
Google's translation indicates that it connects to the remote, and that it's got two Z buttons.
The article claims a vague "millions" of dollars at stake, but I'd be interested to know the actual numbers: I know that when I find myself at one of these pages, I am least likely to click on an ad.
...who's heard way more backlash against Web 2.0 hype than actual Web 2.0 hype?
At the same time, the desensitization is a bit of a different issue in the case of internet hunting because presumably the "hunter" is at least partially motivated by a desire to kill something, whereas for the consumer at the supermarket this is usually an irrelevant side effect.
Any worthwhile "bee" turing test would require that the robot be able to integrate seamlessly into a hive. While building a bee robot/AI that can fool a human under close inspection (even of behaviour alone) is still an enormously complex task, it doesn't necessarily have anything to do with what being a bee is actually like.
Right. Except that Moores Law specifically deals with integrated circuits; it is a special case of Kurzweil's Law of Accelerating Returns.