Was I the only one to find Charlton Heston's scene absolutely hilarious? There were maybe a few muted chuckles in the audience, and I don't think even half of the audience even caught the fact that there was a HUGE joke there. (It's a joke thirty years in the making)
I couldn't help myself and I was almost going to bust wide open laughing. My friend sitting next to me almost lost it, too, which I'm sure didn't help my laughter. That's my fondest memory of that movie.
On a little aside, is Amnesty International involved in this in any way? You'd think that any country holding another country's citizen without a bail hearing would get those guys all in an uproar.
Has anyone really seen local media coverage of this? I know I really haven't. (But then again, I don't really watch any TV anyway.)
But back on topic: I really do agree with Rimbo. It's nice to see some Americans giving a damn and willing to fight bad laws (even good ones. That's their right, too.) and being allowed to. Ahhh... freedom. Hum "America the Beautiful" with me, people!
Just because he has an arrow in his back doesn't mean it was a murder. Maybe he was hit accidentally.
What do you mean? "It just went off!" or something like that? This is a bow and arrow we're talking about, not a gun.
Actually, I think he was probably caught in the hut of some other hunter's wife, and as he was running away, he got pelted in the back. Who would have thought that a cowardly adulterous lech would garner so much attention 10,000 years later? Hey! Gives me hope for making myself famous...
When are we going to detect GRAVITY waves?
on
Optical SETI
·
· Score: 1
Gravity waves expand in all directions and don't dissipate in something as silly as an atmosphere or something. They can go on FOREVER! Wouldn't a really intelligent species be communicating with gravity?
OK, it's maybe a cheap plug for the LIGO project, but can you blame me?
No, really, though, we should be looking at a multitude of sources for contact with intelligent life. Besides, according to Neuromancer, we've already picked up a bunch of signals from the 70s.
Hmmm... that article seems to talk about new LCD technology, rather than CRT technology. I may be mistaken, however; it was only a cursory glance.
On a related note, these will probably never replace laptop screens (primarily because of thickness and weight), but for desktops, this should be a very nice upgrade. I can only hope that this means we'll all have $300 21" CRTs soon.
Has anyone here seen/played Sakura Taisen? The voice acting in that game is terrific. Granted, there is a good deal of FMV, but even the "normal" scenes with the characters speaking is rather well done. Besides, the FMV is an integral part of that game!
Hmmm... take an alien culture that's advanced enough to understand DNA, and what do you think they're going to do with it? Yeah, grow us some humans! Now the prospect of a clone of me making it with some alien chick is a bit... interesting, but there's an equal prospect that these aliens would just as soon clone me up to eat me. Hmmmm...
Didn't Sony make a bunch of fabs for themselves a while ago to put out vast quantities of EE's and GS's? What's going to happen to them? It seems like it'd be an AWFUL waste of money to create a fab for just one generation of chips...
Does anyone else see a potential pr0n application of this? Depending on where you place the electrodes, you could get some twitches in some interesting places. Add some streaming media to this, and look out! Where do I sign up?
The technology, called Bioforce, zaps players through electrodes on their skin when they've been hit in a combat game. It doesn't hurt, but at the highest setting a user's muscles will start to twitch. The first applications are expected to come through personal combat games.
I've been giving this some thought as well. The whole book certainly wouldn't fit in a two hour movie. MAYBE three, put that's pushing it. (You'd probably have to shelve alot of Armitage and Riviera and 3Jane and Maelcum, and keep the focus on Case and Molly and the runs.)
Visually, it'd be pretty nice. Cyberspace, to me, could have been done around the TRON era, though. The mimetic polycarbon suits are clearly T2 tech, and we've had zero-g in movies since what? 2001:A Space Odyssey? So it's not they'd be pushing new tech.
The story would be good, of course, but it all depends on which parts they want to focus on. Do they focus on the Case-Molly relationship? The struggles of the AI against Turing? The entire immoratility motif behind Neuromancer? There are alot of sub-themes, and if they try to do them all, they will all come out like crap.
Personally, I'm just waiting until technology gets to the point where we can each make our own little Neuromancer movies and then post them somewhere so we can all watch each other's. I'd give it about another ten years or so. (Bet Gibson didn't see THAT one coming!)
But what if 100% historic accuracy is boring?
on
Review: Pearl Harbor
·
· Score: 1
You raise very good points. However, there is certainly some good to be done with taking a bit of artistic license. If the story can be made that much more entertaining, it can reach a wider audience, which could inspire some people to go out and actually (gasp!) do research on the subject.
Increasing interest in some important issues, such as the Holocaust, or Enigma, or WW2 in general, can be a Good Thing (TM). (It can also be a Bad Thing(TM).)
I don't think that history is rewritten ENTIRELY for greed. Some of these people may simply want to find a good story to wrap history around. Some of the details may be changed, but hopefully the general idea gets through.
Now, having said that, I think Pearl Harbor was rather poor. I can believe Disney rewriting history to suit their money-loving tastes. I really doubt Spielberg would do such a thing purely for greed.
Hmmm... if you actually read the article, you'll see that they're trying to push this plane through Mach 5 to Mach 7. I really don't think the SR-71 flew at Mach 5. There are also no aircraft that fly at Mach 5 without rockets. The X-43A will try to push past records set by air-breathing and rocket-powered aircraft.
The SR-71 didn't use scramjets, which is the principal technology being tested with the X-43A. Maybe next time you should try reading the article and responding with something pertinent.
Why was this modded all the way to 5 when it was such bad disinformation? Pshaw.
There are many constructive tasks that robots could compete at, but instead, producers turn out endless streams of robot battle shows. Maybe the audience demand isn't there, but I haven't even seen a more constructive show tried.
Well, competition certainly drives alot of what people watch. Maybe robot football (American or European, whatever) would appeal more. Or robot hockey! Oh wait, that's robot battle show again.
Besides sports shows, what other genres are popular on TV? You want a robot sit-com? People can construct robots which would produce the most comedic stereotypes? Or robot drama? Maybe Calculon can show up! Robot doctor shows? How about a robot President who's controlled by a real-life human Vice-President. Oh wait....
Robot battle shows are just plain cool. They're pro wrestling for the engineer/geek in all of us! If we could just get the robots to talk trash with each other while they're whacking or chopping up each other, THEN we'd have something we could sell on a pay-per-view!
Well, yes and no. Your 1Ghz desktop can't do voice recognition. (You can run Dragon on it, but that's different than what HAL was doing.) In fact, I doubt that there are any light-based computers out there right now that are usable.
But, we do have such things as cellular phones, gene therapy, a global network of computers and communications, PDAs, AIDS, Mad Cow Disease, photorealistic computer images, and so on. We don't have videophones, commercial space flight (not widespread, anyway), or interplanteary manned spacecraft.
Let's also remember that science fiction tells as much about the author's present as it does about the author's future. Science fiction books written now would certainly have a different flavor and outlook than science fiction of the 50s and 60s and turn-of-the-century science fiction. Heck, compare Neuromancer to All Tomorrow's Parties if you'd like. That's a single author going through some fifteen years of change.
Now all they need to make realistic looking graphics is 128bits for color and a few orders of magnitude of the speed improvement.
You're kidding me, right? Why do you need 128 bits of color? Your eye can't really discern above 24 bits of color. Anything more than that would just be a waste. As for speed, you can't really tell above 70 fps, either, which is what some of the better setups are hitting nowadays. (You can get up to about 125 or so, but you're not going to be able to discern a real difference.)
The GeForce 3 allows for essentially infinitely many different effects as its "vertex shader" (It just does whatever transforms on vertices) unit is fully programmable. You can do fisheye lenses, motion blur, lens flare, whatever with the unit. That's where the beauty of it is, since nVidia knows that pushing the speed and color envelope isn't really important anymore. Now their focus is on getting more effects out there for programmers to play with.
It should be rather interesting, as hopefully programmers won't have to worry about optimizing graphics code so much, sacrificing time from AI, physics, STORY, etc. Maybe this whole post sounds like some pro-nVidia propaganda, and I hope it hasn't come off that way, but I've just been rather impressed with the *reviews* of the card so far (in other words, no, I haven't seen it in action yet).
I know a fairly good portion of the slashdot population reads Ars Technica also, but for those who don't, they also have their own program like this.
Their Premier Membership has been around for a while. It uses Pay Pal or Amazon's Honor System (gak. No nice link there. You know how to find it.) or even snail mail to receive payment.
Currently the service is completely voluntary. You would "subscribe" only because you want to see the site be maintained without getting blanketed with ads. The subscription amount may be anything, and you don't get anything really cool for paying them, except a little moniker near your name in their forums, but you also don't lose anything for NOT paying them.
It's interesting how these different systems are sprouting up. We will probably see a bunch of these popping up rather soon. Eventually we may see one or two dominant methods because that's how it is with everything, isn't it?
So go check them out! And *maybe* I'd pay for slashdot, but I would imagine that they get plethora dollars from andover or whomeve is sponsoring them.:)
But I did enjoy the movie. I didn't like it as much when it first came out (probably because I was about eight or so), but after watching re-releases on sci-fi channel, I'm beginning to enjoy it more.
And before anyone starts ranting about how it's not all that true to the book, give it a break. That book is like 800 pages long, and making a movie that contained all of that would just plain not work.
But I digress. Is this mini-series nearly as good as the movie? I've never seen it, so I wouldn't know. I'd really like it if there were like a four-hour or so version of the movie on DVD. Now THAT I'd purchase. (Especially if they can keep it all on one DVD. Heck, leave it all on one side of a DVD would be great, but oh well. As long as I only have to flip it once.)
This brings up an interesting point. There are actresses and actors who could do nude scenes for basically indefinitely! Imagine if they themselves mature and learn the acting trade better, but are still as "easy on the eyes" as they were/are in their 20s?
We'd be seeing Sean Connery James Bond's 'til the cows come home! They could remake the original Star Wars. (Should we call it SW:NH or OG SW?) Imagine if Harrison Ford re-did Han Solo, only knowing what he knows now instead of what he knew back then? We could get Joker Skywalker, too! Schweet.
Ahhh... Now it makes more sense. Not much more, though. That's why you draw the arbitrary line l in the plane of the triangle. OK.
It's been YEARS since I had to use any analytical geometry (that's the phrase!). At least it's good to know it's back there somewhere. Now if I can only remember my Cauchy-Schwartz Theorem. Or my Mellin inversion integral. Bah! Silly math!
It certainly looks like it. Anyone know what "the nine-point circle" is? Sounds like something from some upper-level geometry course. *shrug*
From the article: He draws a triangle, labeling the midpoints of the three sides with black dots A, B and C. Then he draws perpendicular lines through each of the midpoints until the lines meet at a point inside the triangle, point E.
He knew from his class work that the algebraic formula for perpendicular lines involves the negative reciprocal of a certain number. So he decided to see what would happen if he didn't make it negative. He did that for each side of the triangle and came up with three new lines that were not perpendicular but still intersected at a new point inside the triangle.
So a real brief primer here: Drawing perpendicular bisectors of the sides of a triangle will yield the in-center. (You draw lines perpendicular to the sides of the triangle, and you do so from the midpoint of these sides. They intersect at a point inside the triangle. Drawing a circle with the center here with the proper radius will yield a circle that's tangent to all three sides of the triangle.)
If you take the slope of a line, the "certain number" in the article, and take the negative reciprocal of it, you get the slope of a line that is perpendicular to the original line.
Basically what this kid (I can call him kid, can't I? Not meant derogatorily) did was instead of taking the negative reciprocal, he just took the plain reciprocal. This number has no real bearing in the world of algebraic geometry (or whatever it's called), AFAIK. This is probably why no one really looked there before. When he played around with THESE lines, he found they intersected at a different point. Apparently drawing a circle of a certain radius from here will yield something, but that's where I get hazy.
The interesting thing to me is that this kid (good kid!) did something off the wall. As they say, a little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing.:) No one really would try this because the reciprocal of the slope of a line doesn't really yield anything useful.
So, I'd like to give props not only to the student, but for the teacher as well, who was willing to look at something the student did, recognizing it, and nurturing it. That's a good story for our edu-ma-cation system, don't you think?
Actually, the NSync (spell it right, dammit!) episode was one of the funnier ones in quite a while. It's still no Futurama, though. Futurama is definitely consistently funnier than Simpsons, although not really approaching the Simpsons' greatness back in the day.
On a side note, I was The Critic on Comedy Central last night also. That was the funniest cartoon of the night! Whatever happened to *that* show???
I already pay for newspapers. I already pay for magazines. If someone can get me better information in a better package than what I can currently get on the Internet, then why not?
Look, I know full well I can go to, say NY Times(free registration required) and get a pretty good read that way. But what if I'm looking for something that's a bit more insightful? Let's face it. Alot of the web sites out there right now are nothing more than, say, a fancy newsletter. Sure, they get updated everyday, but there aren't really alot of Pulitzer prize winners writing for Ars Technica for instance.
What if there were a service that paid the authors a small amount, and you were able to customize which authors you received. So each morning, your favorite writers would show up, bring you the news and their opinions (since anyone can give you the news for free), and you'd pick which articles you liked, and the site would continually customize itself for you. Now THAT would be worth something!
The question would be, in this case, whether or not this can be considered part of the normal evolutionary process.
To say that a mass extinction is normal would be stretching the point. Having conditions suddenly become very hostile will allow for rapid evolution. Rapid evolution should lead also to rapid specialization. I believe there are some interesting studies about life AFTER these mass extinctions and how there is a proliferation of new different species.
Think about it. If the Earth suddenly became alot more hostile, alot of the "weaker" species would die. ("Weaker" in quotes because certain conditions would favor some species more than other. It's not necessarily that one species is better. But I digress.) This would certainly qualify as an acceleration of the evolution process.
Not so much that the Dreamcast is dead and Sega is out of the hardware business. Let's face it. This is business, and that stuff happens. But it's not like the PS2, NGC, or X-Box "beat" the Dreamcast. According to some reports, the software:hardware ratio for the Dreamcast was some 8:1 (PS2 at 2:1). It's not like the Dreamcast was a "bad" system. Perhaps it wasn't marketed very well. But the system was relatively easy to design for and could still pump out graphics on par with the PS2. *sigh*
Is console gaming going down? Right now the PS2 really isn't showing me a whole lot. Maybe I'll be a bit more impressed after E3 and after seeing Nintendo's and Microsoft's fall lineup. Oh well. It's just a sad day for video games.
Slashdot Mirror
Was I the only one to find Charlton Heston's scene absolutely hilarious? There were maybe a few muted chuckles in the audience, and I don't think even half of the audience even caught the fact that there was a HUGE joke there. (It's a joke thirty years in the making)
I couldn't help myself and I was almost going to bust wide open laughing. My friend sitting next to me almost lost it, too, which I'm sure didn't help my laughter. That's my fondest memory of that movie.
On a little aside, is Amnesty International involved in this in any way? You'd think that any country holding another country's citizen without a bail hearing would get those guys all in an uproar.
Has anyone really seen local media coverage of this? I know I really haven't. (But then again, I don't really watch any TV anyway.)
But back on topic: I really do agree with Rimbo. It's nice to see some Americans giving a damn and willing to fight bad laws (even good ones. That's their right, too.) and being allowed to. Ahhh... freedom. Hum "America the Beautiful" with me, people!
Just because he has an arrow in his back doesn't mean it was a murder. Maybe he was hit accidentally.
What do you mean? "It just went off!" or something like that? This is a bow and arrow we're talking about, not a gun.
Actually, I think he was probably caught in the hut of some other hunter's wife, and as he was running away, he got pelted in the back. Who would have thought that a cowardly adulterous lech would garner so much attention 10,000 years later? Hey! Gives me hope for making myself famous...
Gravity waves expand in all directions and don't dissipate in something as silly as an atmosphere or something. They can go on FOREVER! Wouldn't a really intelligent species be communicating with gravity?
OK, it's maybe a cheap plug for the LIGO project, but can you blame me?
No, really, though, we should be looking at a multitude of sources for contact with intelligent life. Besides, according to Neuromancer, we've already picked up a bunch of signals from the 70s.
Hmmm... that article seems to talk about new LCD technology, rather than CRT technology. I may be mistaken, however; it was only a cursory glance.
On a related note, these will probably never replace laptop screens (primarily because of thickness and weight), but for desktops, this should be a very nice upgrade. I can only hope that this means we'll all have $300 21" CRTs soon.
Has anyone here seen/played Sakura Taisen? The voice acting in that game is terrific. Granted, there is a good deal of FMV, but even the "normal" scenes with the characters speaking is rather well done. Besides, the FMV is an integral part of that game!
Hmmm... take an alien culture that's advanced enough to understand DNA, and what do you think they're going to do with it? Yeah, grow us some humans! Now the prospect of a clone of me making it with some alien chick is a bit... interesting, but there's an equal prospect that these aliens would just as soon clone me up to eat me. Hmmmm...
Didn't Sony make a bunch of fabs for themselves a while ago to put out vast quantities of EE's and GS's? What's going to happen to them? It seems like it'd be an AWFUL waste of money to create a fab for just one generation of chips...
Does anyone else see a potential pr0n application of this? Depending on where you place the electrodes, you could get some twitches in some interesting places. Add some streaming media to this, and look out! Where do I sign up?
The technology, called Bioforce, zaps players through electrodes on their skin when they've been hit in a combat game. It doesn't hurt, but at the highest setting a user's muscles will start to twitch. The first applications are expected to come through personal combat games.
I've been giving this some thought as well. The whole book certainly wouldn't fit in a two hour movie. MAYBE three, put that's pushing it. (You'd probably have to shelve alot of Armitage and Riviera and 3Jane and Maelcum, and keep the focus on Case and Molly and the runs.)
Visually, it'd be pretty nice. Cyberspace, to me, could have been done around the TRON era, though. The mimetic polycarbon suits are clearly T2 tech, and we've had zero-g in movies since what? 2001:A Space Odyssey? So it's not they'd be pushing new tech.
The story would be good, of course, but it all depends on which parts they want to focus on. Do they focus on the Case-Molly relationship? The struggles of the AI against Turing? The entire immoratility motif behind Neuromancer? There are alot of sub-themes, and if they try to do them all, they will all come out like crap.
Personally, I'm just waiting until technology gets to the point where we can each make our own little Neuromancer movies and then post them somewhere so we can all watch each other's. I'd give it about another ten years or so. (Bet Gibson didn't see THAT one coming!)
You raise very good points. However, there is certainly some good to be done with taking a bit of artistic license. If the story can be made that much more entertaining, it can reach a wider audience, which could inspire some people to go out and actually (gasp!) do research on the subject.
Increasing interest in some important issues, such as the Holocaust, or Enigma, or WW2 in general, can be a Good Thing (TM). (It can also be a Bad Thing(TM).)
I don't think that history is rewritten ENTIRELY for greed. Some of these people may simply want to find a good story to wrap history around. Some of the details may be changed, but hopefully the general idea gets through.
Now, having said that, I think Pearl Harbor was rather poor. I can believe Disney rewriting history to suit their money-loving tastes. I really doubt Spielberg would do such a thing purely for greed.
Hmmm... if you actually read the article, you'll see that they're trying to push this plane through Mach 5 to Mach 7. I really don't think the SR-71 flew at Mach 5. There are also no aircraft that fly at Mach 5 without rockets. The X-43A will try to push past records set by air-breathing and rocket-powered aircraft.
The SR-71 didn't use scramjets, which is the principal technology being tested with the X-43A. Maybe next time you should try reading the article and responding with something pertinent.
Why was this modded all the way to 5 when it was such bad disinformation? Pshaw.
There are many constructive tasks that robots could compete at, but instead, producers turn out endless streams of robot battle shows. Maybe the audience demand isn't there, but I haven't even seen a more constructive show tried.
Well, competition certainly drives alot of what people watch. Maybe robot football (American or European, whatever) would appeal more. Or robot hockey! Oh wait, that's robot battle show again.
Besides sports shows, what other genres are popular on TV? You want a robot sit-com? People can construct robots which would produce the most comedic stereotypes? Or robot drama? Maybe Calculon can show up! Robot doctor shows? How about a robot President who's controlled by a real-life human Vice-President. Oh wait....
Robot battle shows are just plain cool. They're pro wrestling for the engineer/geek in all of us! If we could just get the robots to talk trash with each other while they're whacking or chopping up each other, THEN we'd have something we could sell on a pay-per-view!
Well, yes and no. Your 1Ghz desktop can't do voice recognition. (You can run Dragon on it, but that's different than what HAL was doing.) In fact, I doubt that there are any light-based computers out there right now that are usable.
But, we do have such things as cellular phones, gene therapy, a global network of computers and communications, PDAs, AIDS, Mad Cow Disease, photorealistic computer images, and so on. We don't have videophones, commercial space flight (not widespread, anyway), or interplanteary manned spacecraft.
Let's also remember that science fiction tells as much about the author's present as it does about the author's future. Science fiction books written now would certainly have a different flavor and outlook than science fiction of the 50s and 60s and turn-of-the-century science fiction. Heck, compare Neuromancer to All Tomorrow's Parties if you'd like. That's a single author going through some fifteen years of change.
Now all they need to make realistic looking graphics is 128bits for color and a few orders of magnitude of the speed improvement.
You're kidding me, right? Why do you need 128 bits of color? Your eye can't really discern above 24 bits of color. Anything more than that would just be a waste. As for speed, you can't really tell above 70 fps, either, which is what some of the better setups are hitting nowadays. (You can get up to about 125 or so, but you're not going to be able to discern a real difference.)
The GeForce 3 allows for essentially infinitely many different effects as its "vertex shader" (It just does whatever transforms on vertices) unit is fully programmable. You can do fisheye lenses, motion blur, lens flare, whatever with the unit. That's where the beauty of it is, since nVidia knows that pushing the speed and color envelope isn't really important anymore. Now their focus is on getting more effects out there for programmers to play with.
It should be rather interesting, as hopefully programmers won't have to worry about optimizing graphics code so much, sacrificing time from AI, physics, STORY, etc. Maybe this whole post sounds like some pro-nVidia propaganda, and I hope it hasn't come off that way, but I've just been rather impressed with the *reviews* of the card so far (in other words, no, I haven't seen it in action yet).
I know a fairly good portion of the slashdot population reads Ars Technica also, but for those who don't, they also have their own program like this.
Their Premier Membership has been around for a while. It uses Pay Pal or Amazon's Honor System (gak. No nice link there. You know how to find it.) or even snail mail to receive payment.
Currently the service is completely voluntary. You would "subscribe" only because you want to see the site be maintained without getting blanketed with ads. The subscription amount may be anything, and you don't get anything really cool for paying them, except a little moniker near your name in their forums, but you also don't lose anything for NOT paying them.
It's interesting how these different systems are sprouting up. We will probably see a bunch of these popping up rather soon. Eventually we may see one or two dominant methods because that's how it is with everything, isn't it?
So go check them out! And *maybe* I'd pay for slashdot, but I would imagine that they get plethora dollars from andover or whomeve is sponsoring them. :)
But I did enjoy the movie. I didn't like it as much when it first came out (probably because I was about eight or so), but after watching re-releases on sci-fi channel, I'm beginning to enjoy it more.
And before anyone starts ranting about how it's not all that true to the book, give it a break. That book is like 800 pages long, and making a movie that contained all of that would just plain not work.
But I digress. Is this mini-series nearly as good as the movie? I've never seen it, so I wouldn't know. I'd really like it if there were like a four-hour or so version of the movie on DVD. Now THAT I'd purchase. (Especially if they can keep it all on one DVD. Heck, leave it all on one side of a DVD would be great, but oh well. As long as I only have to flip it once.)
This brings up an interesting point. There are actresses and actors who could do nude scenes for basically indefinitely! Imagine if they themselves mature and learn the acting trade better, but are still as "easy on the eyes" as they were/are in their 20s?
We'd be seeing Sean Connery James Bond's 'til the cows come home! They could remake the original Star Wars. (Should we call it SW:NH or OG SW?) Imagine if Harrison Ford re-did Han Solo, only knowing what he knows now instead of what he knew back then? We could get Joker Skywalker, too! Schweet.
Ahhh... Now it makes more sense. Not much more, though. That's why you draw the arbitrary line l in the plane of the triangle. OK.
It's been YEARS since I had to use any analytical geometry (that's the phrase!). At least it's good to know it's back there somewhere. Now if I can only remember my Cauchy-Schwartz Theorem. Or my Mellin inversion integral. Bah! Silly math!
It certainly looks like it. Anyone know what "the nine-point circle" is? Sounds like something from some upper-level geometry course. *shrug*
From the article: He draws a triangle, labeling the midpoints of the three sides with black dots A, B and C. Then he draws perpendicular lines through each of the midpoints until the lines meet at a point inside the triangle, point E.
He knew from his class work that the algebraic formula for perpendicular lines involves the negative reciprocal of a certain number. So he decided to see what would happen if he didn't make it negative. He did that for each side of the triangle and came up with three new lines that were not perpendicular but still intersected at a new point inside the triangle.
So a real brief primer here: Drawing perpendicular bisectors of the sides of a triangle will yield the in-center. (You draw lines perpendicular to the sides of the triangle, and you do so from the midpoint of these sides. They intersect at a point inside the triangle. Drawing a circle with the center here with the proper radius will yield a circle that's tangent to all three sides of the triangle.)
If you take the slope of a line, the "certain number" in the article, and take the negative reciprocal of it, you get the slope of a line that is perpendicular to the original line.
Basically what this kid (I can call him kid, can't I? Not meant derogatorily) did was instead of taking the negative reciprocal, he just took the plain reciprocal. This number has no real bearing in the world of algebraic geometry (or whatever it's called), AFAIK. This is probably why no one really looked there before. When he played around with THESE lines, he found they intersected at a different point. Apparently drawing a circle of a certain radius from here will yield something, but that's where I get hazy.
The interesting thing to me is that this kid (good kid!) did something off the wall. As they say, a little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing. :) No one really would try this because the reciprocal of the slope of a line doesn't really yield anything useful.
So, I'd like to give props not only to the student, but for the teacher as well, who was willing to look at something the student did, recognizing it, and nurturing it. That's a good story for our edu-ma-cation system, don't you think?
Don't they make iron-on transfers for printers nowadays? Let's combine the two technologies and create ready-to-wear computers!
Actually, the NSync (spell it right, dammit!) episode was one of the funnier ones in quite a while. It's still no Futurama, though. Futurama is definitely consistently funnier than Simpsons, although not really approaching the Simpsons' greatness back in the day.
On a side note, I was The Critic on Comedy Central last night also. That was the funniest cartoon of the night! Whatever happened to *that* show???
I already pay for newspapers. I already pay for magazines. If someone can get me better information in a better package than what I can currently get on the Internet, then why not?
Look, I know full well I can go to, say NY Times (free registration required) and get a pretty good read that way. But what if I'm looking for something that's a bit more insightful? Let's face it. Alot of the web sites out there right now are nothing more than, say, a fancy newsletter. Sure, they get updated everyday, but there aren't really alot of Pulitzer prize winners writing for Ars Technica for instance.
What if there were a service that paid the authors a small amount, and you were able to customize which authors you received. So each morning, your favorite writers would show up, bring you the news and their opinions (since anyone can give you the news for free), and you'd pick which articles you liked, and the site would continually customize itself for you. Now THAT would be worth something!
The question would be, in this case, whether or not this can be considered part of the normal evolutionary process.
To say that a mass extinction is normal would be stretching the point. Having conditions suddenly become very hostile will allow for rapid evolution. Rapid evolution should lead also to rapid specialization. I believe there are some interesting studies about life AFTER these mass extinctions and how there is a proliferation of new different species.
Think about it. If the Earth suddenly became alot more hostile, alot of the "weaker" species would die. ("Weaker" in quotes because certain conditions would favor some species more than other. It's not necessarily that one species is better. But I digress.) This would certainly qualify as an acceleration of the evolution process.
Not so much that the Dreamcast is dead and Sega is out of the hardware business. Let's face it. This is business, and that stuff happens. But it's not like the PS2, NGC, or X-Box "beat" the Dreamcast. According to some reports, the software:hardware ratio for the Dreamcast was some 8:1 (PS2 at 2:1). It's not like the Dreamcast was a "bad" system. Perhaps it wasn't marketed very well. But the system was relatively easy to design for and could still pump out graphics on par with the PS2. *sigh*
Is console gaming going down? Right now the PS2 really isn't showing me a whole lot. Maybe I'll be a bit more impressed after E3 and after seeing Nintendo's and Microsoft's fall lineup. Oh well. It's just a sad day for video games.
January 31, 2001: The Day the Dreamcast died. RIP