You have to become an acolyte to find that out. And I hope you don't mind peanut butter, lots and lots of peanut butter. Are you allergic to penicillin?
I just read an essay on the importance of Dadaism in modern art, hence part of the tone of my posts about the AAFFLACCC, Ltd.
Unfortunately, for the time being, due to financial considerations, Agnostic Anabaptists For Free Love And Chocolate Chip Cookies, Ltd., are implementing a BYOB policy regarding the wimmens. I found mine on the Internet, but we encourage our acolytes to use any and all available means. Luckily, chocolate chip cookie ingredients can be found at any local supermarket for very reasonable prices, and oftentimes such grocery markets contain (at higher price and more effort) cute blond women as well!
I had no idea any of that had happened. That's awful, but really interesting to read: thanks for taking the time to write about it. (I'm a little embarrassed, too, since I live only about 500km north of Mexico.)
I'm wondering which is funnier: the post, or that someone modded it 'informative' rather than 'funny'. Probably the post, coz it's one of the funniest things I've read today.
>I won't be mentioning which religious organizations tend to do this, but they all seem to belong to one religion, at least in the U.S.
Haven't been to Utah much, have you? Or Idaho? Where I live, I have *three* completely different religions showing up semi-regularly at my door asking me to join them. I always say I can't coz I'm too busy waxing the goat in preparation for MY religion and ask if they'd like to join. They always say no, even though my religion involves cute blond women and free chocolate chip cookies. Shows how smart THEY are.
There is a difference, but this particular distinction is similar to saying "yes, we have freedom of assembly, but you can only get together with a maximum of three other people, in a certain town in South Dakota, on alternate Thursdays." Which is exactly what the US government is doing to the Constitution. Kent State is just imitating them.
I didn't know that. Plus, it's also quite possible that they're bulking up in the upper sections, but have yet to start surging at their termini. It's even possible that they're still shrinking at the bottom end, while growing at the top/middle, due to hysteresis or just an increased temperature differential. I hadn't really thought about that until now.
Unless you have one heckuva WiFi antenna, you're going to have problems simultaneously reading/posting here and walking across, say, siberia. Now, I grant you a sidewalk to the moon will have *great* line-of-sight, but I'm not sure how well even a pringles can antenna is going to do when you get past the 10,000 km-from-nearest-access-point range.
There have been times I've been driving between Grand Junction and Moab, on I-70, and have counted several minutes between seeing cars, and that's at what the rest of the country considers rush hour. I wonder if there's a more deserted bit of the interstate system anywhere.
The first attempts at major highways were community-subscription-based. If your town paid, the highway would come to you. It didn't work very well at all because the highways went all over the place, hitting only those towns rather than doing efficient routing, and sometimes stopping entirely for a ways because nobody was willing to pay. My grandfather remembers highways in Illinois being put together like this and he described them as incredibly annoying. If they'd had another 50 years they might've made sense since they would've dictated where new commerce ran.
Look at the history of railbuilding in the American West in the 1800's. Private companies ran it, so what they did was put in lines with stations about 4 km away from the nearest town, after having purchased all the surrounding land, then as the town died and the new station became the new town, made enormous profits on selling the land for the new town. Classic Big Company behavior.
Let's hear it for big government projects: designed systematically and without intent to screw the little people.
I've flown with colorblind people. I have no problem with that. I've let a woman who was blind in one eye take the controls (not for a landing, mind you, tho' I've seen a guy blind in one eye shoot touch-and-go landings, and he did just fine.) I do have a problem with the idea of soccer moms who don't signal turns because they're too busy yelling at kids in the back seat, who then at the last moment cut across two lanes of traffic to try and make their turnoff. THEM, flying, would be a really, monumentally bad idea. Flying isn't for everyone. It could be for many more people than it is, but many of the people who could afford it, shouldn't be allowed to fly.
I want to see any slashdotter walk 400,000 km. It took Albert Speer thirteen years to walk the equivalent of the circumference of the Earth and he had absolutely nothing else to do with his time during his walk. It took my father 20 years of riding his bike to work every single day before he'd ridden 400,000 km. It's a great idea, but by the time you got there you'd be wishing you'd taken the bus.
It's all about traffic, and more specifically the max weight of that traffic. I ride my bike on a section of US 287 (a highway that goes from the mexican border at Brownsville TX to the Canadian border in Montana) and there are sections of concrete, uncracked, smooth, and very pleasant, that have dates in the 1920's stamped in the concrete, because 287 itself has been moved two blocks over and these sections now deal with nothing more than occasional car traffic. Meanwhile, the nearby Interstate has, when you count ballast and sub-asphalt reinforcement, a meter-thick bed of support materials, and it gets replaced every five years. About the time they're due to replace it, the double-wide dips of dual tires are clearly obvious along its length with cracks running along their length.
side-note. My grandfather remembers the first big highway in Illinois being put in place in about 1921. It was concrete and poured in long strips with no gaps, in late fall. The first summer, it streched thermally such that it was perfectly flat for several km and then there'd be a hump, or rather a sharp peak, about the height of a car, and then it would be flat again for several km, so people would have to detour around the peaks as they drove their new highway. By the time they poured the sections of 287 I ride on, they'd figured this out and had 5mm gaps every 3 meters or so.
Oh, I know, I know. Let me put it another way: I would *definitely* vote for libertarians. Reagan was a civil rights disaster. He helped exacerbate the growing division between rich and poor, slashed funding to financially struggling families in favor of increasing corporate welfare, and he was completely delusional about possible and feasible strategic defense initiatives. He thought it was okay to consider ketchup a vegetable as regards child nutrition and probably authorized the CIA to sell drugs to finance terrorists in Central America.
And if I had the choice to vote for him or Dubya, I'd vote for Reagan in a heartbeat.
>Finally, we can throw in distributed WiFi as a pipe dream (one that last-mile owners are, ironically, trying to quash via government intervention to pass laws against it).
This is ironic in the way that a buzzard chasing off crows from roadkill is. Your post is completely right, but a subject is ironic only if there's a hidden humor in the situation, and in this one it's not even slightly hidden: they want to eliminate their competition, and since they can't do it by competition they use legislation. Since laissez-faire capitalism as regards distributed wi-fi will screw the providers to death, they're trying to get the government to pass laws against it, *while* they're telling the world at large that laws should not be passed to regulate pricing structures on the Internet. THAT is closer to ironic.
*dude*. I'd call myself a left-wing whackjob, but these days I'm in favor of libertarians, old-school Republicans who actually believe in not spending money and not passing laws to control people's lives -- I'd probably vote for Reagan at this point. Instead I'm faced with two parties who both want to pass laws to protect me from unlikely dangers, and maximize their corporate donors' profit margins to my detriment.
Last time I was in New Zealand, a year ago, every glacier I visited was a long, long, long hike past signs that said "this is where the glacier's end was in 1780" and "this is where the glacier's end was in 1910" and after another km: oh, wow, there's the glacier! But I didn't hike to many in the way south of the south island.
I've been hiking in subalpine areas a number of times when I've been warned about incipient electrical activity because the zipper on my pants has started buzzing. REAL hikers apparently keep some aluminum foil on top of their backpacks so they can hear it well before zippers start arcing. (head downhill, fast, get your pack off your back, and if/when you stop huddle down and keep your feet together, since even a close strike will have enough voltage drop across the ground to go up one leg and down the other if you're standing straddling something.)
Surface-mount soldering by hand is easy. I've loaded upwards of 300 components, mostly IC's, on a board and gotten it working. BGA's are a bitch, though, as are LLP's.
I had no idea that cataract or glaucoma surgery increased the risk of detached retinas. (In fact, I'm going to have to reread some books before I believe it, but I'll take your word for it for now.) Note that reattaching the retina is neither pleasant nor without effects on your vision, so it's not something you want to risk. The treatment I'm most familiar with uses a laser to burn holes in the retina and the underlying tissue, so that scar tissue forms between the layers and holds the retina in place. Ew.
I remember reading that John Audubon, who knew a few things about counting birds, one time tried to count a flock of passenger pigeons that was flying over and after 8 hours of counting, he estimated that it was about 1.2 billion birds. I've read other people talking about how the pigeons would land in an area and trees would start collapsing under their combined weight. That's a lot of birds. So, even at 20 or 30%, that could be tens of billions of birds. The sheer amount of gunpowder and shot that involves is kind of sobering.
I'd add: they can replace lenses easily and quickly. They can also replace corneas easily and quickly. It's not something you WANT to have happen, but if it does, the surgery is routine so if damage to the cornea from laser ablation leads to later-life problems, it's no biggie.
Damage to the cornea can lead to opacity and blindness: it's the single leading cause of blindness in sub-Saharan Africa. This is disgusting so you might not want to read it. There's a disease, a parasite, that makes people's eyelids bend inwards so their lashes drag on their corneas. After a while, the lashes destroy the surface of the cornea, after scraping off the epithelial tissue (the 'flap') that covers the cornea, and the person's eye turns white from scar tissue across the entire front surface of the eye. And it hurts like hell because every time you blink you're dragging broken eyelashes across the surface of what used to be your eye. So it's possible that corneal damage could lead to blindness. But it can be surgically corrected (well, mostly: people who have been suffering from this parasite for a long time aren't usually fixable anymore because the damage is too extensive) so it's not a problem if you have regular access to decent medical care.
>Apparently this determines my exact perscription, none of that "Is this better, or that" lens swapping. I wonder why eye doctors don't use this all the time.
Everyone else is commenting on this and I thought I would, too. Most lens prescriptions consist of two parts: how many diopters of spherical correction you need for an eye, and a modification of that correction to account for astigmatism, which consists of a 2-D curve, a cylinder, added to the existing spherical correction. So you have a sphere of a given magnitude, and a cylinder of another magnitude, and an angle at which the cylinder overlays the sphere.
The 'one better, two better' machine measures this.
The machine that maps your cornea A: costs $70,000, and B: actually generates a topographic map of your cornea. That's great if you're going to work on the cornea, but it doesn't map the lens beneath the cornea (which could be responsible for some of the astigmatism) so it can't correct for problems with the lens or other aberrations that are below the surface. And, more to the point, if you're handing a lens prescription that only has three variables (spherical, cylindrical, and angle of cylinder/sphere) you don't need and cannot use most of the information in a topographic map. If people ground lenses that accommodated for every lump and bump in your eye, then it'd be very useful (though it wouldn't work for glasses, since they don't move with your eyes) but we don't do that. We approximate it with bifocals/trifocals/gradient lenses, sort of. But corneal topography measures something different than the 'one better, two better' machine, and while it's very useful for laser surgery, in figuring out how to resculpt the cornea, it isn't a replacement for measuring the optic system of the eye.
It just depends on how you assess the risk/reward ratio. It's much more likely you'll be crushed into a strawberry pulp while driving your car than that you'll lose your sight during eye surgery. I bet you still drive. As Bruce Schneier says: we always overestimate the risk of the unfamiliar danger, and underestimate the risk of the known. It's a survival trait, and a very good one. Someone else once explained the logical basis of opposition to nuclear power: if the worst case scenario is simply unacceptable, then *any* risk whatsoever means the proposal should be rejected. That's what you're saying, and it's perfectly logical and correct. Just consider that there are many, many other things you do on a daily basis that have the same worst case scenario.
Slashdot Mirror
You have to become an acolyte to find that out. And I hope you don't mind peanut butter, lots and lots of peanut butter. Are you allergic to penicillin?
I just read an essay on the importance of Dadaism in modern art, hence part of the tone of my posts about the AAFFLACCC, Ltd.
Unfortunately, for the time being, due to financial considerations, Agnostic Anabaptists For Free Love And Chocolate Chip Cookies, Ltd., are implementing a BYOB policy regarding the wimmens. I found mine on the Internet, but we encourage our acolytes to use any and all available means. Luckily, chocolate chip cookie ingredients can be found at any local supermarket for very reasonable prices, and oftentimes such grocery markets contain (at higher price and more effort) cute blond women as well!
I had no idea any of that had happened. That's awful, but really interesting to read: thanks for taking the time to write about it. (I'm a little embarrassed, too, since I live only about 500km north of Mexico.)
I'm wondering which is funnier: the post, or that someone modded it 'informative' rather than 'funny'.
Probably the post, coz it's one of the funniest things I've read today.
>I won't be mentioning which religious organizations tend to do this, but they all seem to belong to one religion, at least in the U.S.
Haven't been to Utah much, have you? Or Idaho? Where I live, I have *three* completely different religions showing up semi-regularly at my door asking me to join them. I always say I can't coz I'm too busy waxing the goat in preparation for MY religion and ask if they'd like to join. They always say no, even though my religion involves cute blond women and free chocolate chip cookies. Shows how smart THEY are.
There is a difference, but this particular distinction is similar to saying "yes, we have freedom of assembly, but you can only get together with a maximum of three other people, in a certain town in South Dakota, on alternate Thursdays." Which is exactly what the US government is doing to the Constitution. Kent State is just imitating them.
I didn't know that.
Plus, it's also quite possible that they're bulking up in the upper sections, but have yet to start surging at their termini. It's even possible that they're still shrinking at the bottom end, while growing at the top/middle, due to hysteresis or just an increased temperature differential. I hadn't really thought about that until now.
Unless you have one heckuva WiFi antenna, you're going to have problems simultaneously reading/posting here and walking across, say, siberia. Now, I grant you a sidewalk to the moon will have *great* line-of-sight, but I'm not sure how well even a pringles can antenna is going to do when you get past the 10,000 km-from-nearest-access-point range.
There have been times I've been driving between Grand Junction and Moab, on I-70, and have counted several minutes between seeing cars, and that's at what the rest of the country considers rush hour. I wonder if there's a more deserted bit of the interstate system anywhere.
The first attempts at major highways were community-subscription-based. If your town paid, the highway would come to you. It didn't work very well at all because the highways went all over the place, hitting only those towns rather than doing efficient routing, and sometimes stopping entirely for a ways because nobody was willing to pay. My grandfather remembers highways in Illinois being put together like this and he described them as incredibly annoying. If they'd had another 50 years they might've made sense since they would've dictated where new commerce ran.
Look at the history of railbuilding in the American West in the 1800's. Private companies ran it, so what they did was put in lines with stations about 4 km away from the nearest town, after having purchased all the surrounding land, then as the town died and the new station became the new town, made enormous profits on selling the land for the new town. Classic Big Company behavior.
Let's hear it for big government projects: designed systematically and without intent to screw the little people.
I've flown with colorblind people. I have no problem with that. I've let a woman who was blind in one eye take the controls (not for a landing, mind you, tho' I've seen a guy blind in one eye shoot touch-and-go landings, and he did just fine.)
I do have a problem with the idea of soccer moms who don't signal turns because they're too busy yelling at kids in the back seat, who then at the last moment cut across two lanes of traffic to try and make their turnoff. THEM, flying, would be a really, monumentally bad idea.
Flying isn't for everyone. It could be for many more people than it is, but many of the people who could afford it, shouldn't be allowed to fly.
I want to see any slashdotter walk 400,000 km. It took Albert Speer thirteen years to walk the equivalent of the circumference of the Earth and he had absolutely nothing else to do with his time during his walk. It took my father 20 years of riding his bike to work every single day before he'd ridden 400,000 km. It's a great idea, but by the time you got there you'd be wishing you'd taken the bus.
It's all about traffic, and more specifically the max weight of that traffic. I ride my bike on a section of US 287 (a highway that goes from the mexican border at Brownsville TX to the Canadian border in Montana) and there are sections of concrete, uncracked, smooth, and very pleasant, that have dates in the 1920's stamped in the concrete, because 287 itself has been moved two blocks over and these sections now deal with nothing more than occasional car traffic. Meanwhile, the nearby Interstate has, when you count ballast and sub-asphalt reinforcement, a meter-thick bed of support materials, and it gets replaced every five years. About the time they're due to replace it, the double-wide dips of dual tires are clearly obvious along its length with cracks running along their length.
side-note. My grandfather remembers the first big highway in Illinois being put in place in about 1921. It was concrete and poured in long strips with no gaps, in late fall. The first summer, it streched thermally such that it was perfectly flat for several km and then there'd be a hump, or rather a sharp peak, about the height of a car, and then it would be flat again for several km, so people would have to detour around the peaks as they drove their new highway. By the time they poured the sections of 287 I ride on, they'd figured this out and had 5mm gaps every 3 meters or so.
Oh, I know, I know. Let me put it another way: I would *definitely* vote for libertarians.
Reagan was a civil rights disaster. He helped exacerbate the growing division between rich and poor, slashed funding to financially struggling families in favor of increasing corporate welfare, and he was completely delusional about possible and feasible strategic defense initiatives. He thought it was okay to consider ketchup a vegetable as regards child nutrition and probably authorized the CIA to sell drugs to finance terrorists in Central America.
And if I had the choice to vote for him or Dubya, I'd vote for Reagan in a heartbeat.
>Finally, we can throw in distributed WiFi as a pipe dream (one that last-mile owners are, ironically, trying to quash via government intervention to pass laws against it).
This is ironic in the way that a buzzard chasing off crows from roadkill is. Your post is completely right, but a subject is ironic only if there's a hidden humor in the situation, and in this one it's not even slightly hidden: they want to eliminate their competition, and since they can't do it by competition they use legislation.
Since laissez-faire capitalism as regards distributed wi-fi will screw the providers to death, they're trying to get the government to pass laws against it, *while* they're telling the world at large that laws should not be passed to regulate pricing structures on the Internet. THAT is closer to ironic.
*dude*. I'd call myself a left-wing whackjob, but these days I'm in favor of libertarians, old-school Republicans who actually believe in not spending money and not passing laws to control people's lives -- I'd probably vote for Reagan at this point. Instead I'm faced with two parties who both want to pass laws to protect me from unlikely dangers, and maximize their corporate donors' profit margins to my detriment.
Last time I was in New Zealand, a year ago, every glacier I visited was a long, long, long hike past signs that said "this is where the glacier's end was in 1780" and "this is where the glacier's end was in 1910" and after another km: oh, wow, there's the glacier! But I didn't hike to many in the way south of the south island.
I've been hiking in subalpine areas a number of times when I've been warned about incipient electrical activity because the zipper on my pants has started buzzing. REAL hikers apparently keep some aluminum foil on top of their backpacks so they can hear it well before zippers start arcing.
(head downhill, fast, get your pack off your back, and if/when you stop huddle down and keep your feet together, since even a close strike will have enough voltage drop across the ground to go up one leg and down the other if you're standing straddling something.)
Surface-mount soldering by hand is easy. I've loaded upwards of 300 components, mostly IC's, on a board and gotten it working. BGA's are a bitch, though, as are LLP's.
I had no idea that cataract or glaucoma surgery increased the risk of detached retinas. (In fact, I'm going to have to reread some books before I believe it, but I'll take your word for it for now.) Note that reattaching the retina is neither pleasant nor without effects on your vision, so it's not something you want to risk. The treatment I'm most familiar with uses a laser to burn holes in the retina and the underlying tissue, so that scar tissue forms between the layers and holds the retina in place. Ew.
I hope your eye surgery goes well!
You're probably right.
I remember reading that John Audubon, who knew a few things about counting birds, one time tried to count a flock of passenger pigeons that was flying over and after 8 hours of counting, he estimated that it was about 1.2 billion birds. I've read other people talking about how the pigeons would land in an area and trees would start collapsing under their combined weight. That's a lot of birds. So, even at 20 or 30%, that could be tens of billions of birds. The sheer amount of gunpowder and shot that involves is kind of sobering.
I figured, from his description, that he was talking about a topo scanner, not an autorefractor.
That was a great answer.
I'd add: they can replace lenses easily and quickly. They can also replace corneas easily and quickly. It's not something you WANT to have happen, but if it does, the surgery is routine so if damage to the cornea from laser ablation leads to later-life problems, it's no biggie.
Damage to the cornea can lead to opacity and blindness: it's the single leading cause of blindness in sub-Saharan Africa. This is disgusting so you might not want to read it. There's a disease, a parasite, that makes people's eyelids bend inwards so their lashes drag on their corneas. After a while, the lashes destroy the surface of the cornea, after scraping off the epithelial tissue (the 'flap') that covers the cornea, and the person's eye turns white from scar tissue across the entire front surface of the eye. And it hurts like hell because every time you blink you're dragging broken eyelashes across the surface of what used to be your eye. So it's possible that corneal damage could lead to blindness. But it can be surgically corrected (well, mostly: people who have been suffering from this parasite for a long time aren't usually fixable anymore because the damage is too extensive) so it's not a problem if you have regular access to decent medical care.
>Apparently this determines my exact perscription, none of that "Is this better, or that" lens swapping. I wonder why eye doctors don't use this all the time.
Everyone else is commenting on this and I thought I would, too.
Most lens prescriptions consist of two parts: how many diopters of spherical correction you need for an eye, and a modification of that correction to account for astigmatism, which consists of a 2-D curve, a cylinder, added to the existing spherical correction. So you have a sphere of a given magnitude, and a cylinder of another magnitude, and an angle at which the cylinder overlays the sphere.
The 'one better, two better' machine measures this.
The machine that maps your cornea A: costs $70,000, and B: actually generates a topographic map of your cornea. That's great if you're going to work on the cornea, but it doesn't map the lens beneath the cornea (which could be responsible for some of the astigmatism) so it can't correct for problems with the lens or other aberrations that are below the surface. And, more to the point, if you're handing a lens prescription that only has three variables (spherical, cylindrical, and angle of cylinder/sphere) you don't need and cannot use most of the information in a topographic map. If people ground lenses that accommodated for every lump and bump in your eye, then it'd be very useful (though it wouldn't work for glasses, since they don't move with your eyes) but we don't do that. We approximate it with bifocals/trifocals/gradient lenses, sort of. But corneal topography measures something different than the 'one better, two better' machine, and while it's very useful for laser surgery, in figuring out how to resculpt the cornea, it isn't a replacement for measuring the optic system of the eye.
It just depends on how you assess the risk/reward ratio. It's much more likely you'll be crushed into a strawberry pulp while driving your car than that you'll lose your sight during eye surgery. I bet you still drive. As Bruce Schneier says: we always overestimate the risk of the unfamiliar danger, and underestimate the risk of the known. It's a survival trait, and a very good one. Someone else once explained the logical basis of opposition to nuclear power: if the worst case scenario is simply unacceptable, then *any* risk whatsoever means the proposal should be rejected. That's what you're saying, and it's perfectly logical and correct. Just consider that there are many, many other things you do on a daily basis that have the same worst case scenario.