The first time I heard a Christina Aguilera song I knew she was going to be big. Ditto Pink, and to a lesser extent Avril Lavigne. *YOU* are still listening to The Who and Led Zep, but I've heard my girlfriend's friends say "who?" when I mention them, and I've heard radio callins where teens and people in their early twenties were saying that The Who and Led Zep had no more relevance than Buddy Holly or Billie Holiday. In twenty years, those kids will be listening to Pink and Christina and complaining about how all new music sucks.
I don't really understand what you're arguing, frankly. If you consider 'quality' to be mega-stars then Led Zep, U2, and Britney all have quality. If you consider quality to be 'music that people will listen to in twenty years' -- as much as I hate to say it, I bet there'll be a lot of people still listening to Britney because that's what they listened to when they were forming their musical influences. Modest Mouse and Arcade Fire started out as indie acts that nobody had ever heard of -- I first ran across MM like seven years ago -- and now they're touring some of the larger venues in the US and getting songs and albums well up in the top twenty charts. Does that mean they suck, because they're mega-stars? Does that mean they have quality? Does that mean people will listen to them in twenty years? The first two depend on your definition and the third depends on what happens in the next 20 years. But defining 'classic' in the present tense is a contradiction in terms.
The basic idea of justice in all of Western civilization is that it is proportional: the punishment should fit the crime. That's why Americans react poorly to news of women being stoned for adultery or petty thieves having their hands cut off.
I cannot see how sitting in a cage for ten years is 'damage equal to the damage he caused'. What's your secret equation for calculating how long someone sits in a cage to be equal to murder, or car theft, or copying songs? How, in other words, can you draw any sort of equivalence between completely non-equivalent acts?
It sounds like you would really have enjoyed medieval England, where they did torture people before killing them. In public. It was a form of amusement. Oddly enough, they had far higher levels of crime then than now, despite that. Funny thing about humans: they're really bad at calculating risk/rewards and cost/benefit analysis, and as such, harsh sentencing doesn't seem to have very much deterrent effect, according to a couple thousand years' data.
I have some friends with PhD's in nuclear science who claim that radiation is beneficial. They go further: life started when there was a lot more radiation, so most of our genetic machinery is designed to work with far higher radiation than what we're seeing, which is to say we can stand a lot more radiation with little harm. They go further and claim that because there's less radiation now, we have more problems -- higher background radiation might act to suppress immune system malfunctions (sitting in radioactive hot springs does seem to reduce the symptoms of arthritis.) Life survival vs. number of cells should be inversely proportional as radiation level rises: if a bacterium has its DNA badly injured by a radiative event, it's less likely to survive than an animal with a million cells. (I've read in other places that every strand of DNA in every cell experiences tens of damage events requiring repair every day.) My friends the PhD's go so far as to claim that the reason that the seven counties in the US with the longest average lifespan are all on the Continental Divide in Colorado where the radiation levels are highest because of the elevation. (Sorry I can't find a better link for the Eight Americas dataset: you have to download an Excel spreadsheet to get the raw data.)
Basically what we're talking about here is a type of compression algorithm. A person lives an average of 75 years, and for purposes of this discussion, let's assume the person is youngish, since they're more likely to commit crimes. Say 25 years. That means that a 50 year sentence is essentially the maximum useful sentence -- it is equivalent to life in prison. So the *worst* crime imaginable would map to this -- the one where you kill everyone in the world by sexually assaulting them with kittens and then peeing on their dead bodies while singing heavy metal ballads. A proportional justice system means that anything less than this ultimate crime, should have a lesser sentence. From there, it's just a question of how you map things -- is it linear or logarithmic with the severity of the crime (since causing a crash that injures two people is only 1/100000000 as bad as killing everyone in the world with kittens, should your sentence for doing this be only 1/100000000 as long as a life sentence, or only 1/1000?) What level of crime is sufficient that anything above it maps to life in prison? How much will that cost?
To the victim, any sentence probably seems too lenient, because the victim has been personally affected. The questions are: what is best for society as a whole, and what are we actually trying to do with imprisonment?
Fundamentalists (which I use in its original meaning) and many conservatives feel that criminality is permanent, and as such, prisons are primarily punishment, retribution, or a way of getting rid of criminals if we can't outright kill them. As a result, they tend to want very long prison sentences or the death penalty. Progressives, and most liberals, feel that criminality is situational, and as such, prisons can be used for rehabilitation, so that once the sentence is served, with appropriate help and training, the person coming out is possibly no longer a criminal and can live a useful, productive, non-criminal life.
Basically, you have to ask yourself what you think prison is for. If it's for making people suffer for having done bad things, you're probably going to want long sentences and capital punishment. If it's for fixing broken people, you're probably going to favor shorter sentences and definitely going to favor education, job training, and self-advancement opportunities being offered in prisons. Victims of crime are naturally going to feel retributive towards the criminals who caused them suffering, and probably towards criminals in general. I personally think that one of the responsibilities of society at large is to approach crime with a neutral point of view, and make sentencing depend on what's best for society as a whole, rather than just to appease the feelings of the victim.
>In music I have been watching the VH-1 classic music channel, and it is interesting: 50-60's rock, 70's hippies, 80's bad hair day, 90's all against the world, 2000's? Paris Hilton? Britany Spears? You have got to be kidding me. Yes there are good artists in 2000, but they are not gaining the traction that good artists used to get.
And in 10 years, someone just like you will be writing, "the 00's? Alternative... but the '10's? Who is any good? NOBODY. Yeah, there are okay artists today, but nothing like the ones we had just ten years ago."
You're watching the *classic* movie channel. Ask yourself what *classic* means, and part of the definition will certainly be "withstands the test of time". Of course there aren't any classic things from the last five years, because they're still new.
The problem I think you're trying to address is encapsulated in "not gaining the traction that good artists used to get" and that, in my opinion, is a strength of the Internet, not a failing. Think of this as being something like information asymmetry, where the seller knows more about the product than the buyer, so can use that knowledge to manipulate the price to the seller's advantage. In a similar way, when the only means for the buyer to find music is by a push technology, the seller determines the market, but as the market changes to a pull technology, it is *possible* for anyone to hear any band. It doesn't happen uniformly, but it could. So what DOES happen is that people, instead of relying just on what they hear on the radio, begin to rely on what other people listen to (popularity lists) and what their friends are listening to. This makes the market vastly broader, so many more bands are getting exposure, and the consumer's money is A: better spent (more music per dollar, especially with single-track downloads) and B: more widely spent, meaning fewer mega-rock-stars.
While I'm at it, I'm not going to argue that Britney's a great artist, but twenty years ago I wouldn't've argued that Cher or Captain&Tenniele (or however you spell it) were great artists either, and they sure were selling a mess of albums.
I think that's part of it, but here's the thing: if a kid only ever eats pizza throughout childhood, the kid's going to end up as an adult who mostly eats pizza. If a kid is exposed to LOTS and LOTS of different foods, the kid's going to have a much wider range of interests as an adult, and is consequently going to be less likely to accept only having pizza. That leads to discontented people. In a small community, marrying someone and spending your life with that person is not only a really good idea, it might be the only option you have, and is certainly the option that's best for the community. The larger the community, and the more options that you perceive you have, the less likely you are to stick with one option. I think that, in a nutshell, is a major driving force for the rise of divorce, serial monogamy, and other modern ills. I think people have been messing around throughout history, but for much of history it wasn't a socially acceptable option to mess around as a lifestyle.
Plus, there's a biological drive to sow oats widely, so I'm not sure it's really possible for this particular appetite to be sated, only to choose not to act on impulses.
Whenever the 'sex before marriage' argument or its like comes up, I always ask "do you drive a car before you buy it?" People usually splutter. One time a guy said "yeah, that's a good counter-argument. Now tell me where you shop for toothbrushes so I can never, ever shop there again."
As a more serious response, if most men are like I am, it doesn't matter *how* much wild-oat-sowing you do, you'll still be wondering what that pretty woman who just walked by would be like. In fact, it's been my experience that the more wild oats, the more I wonder about the next potential opportunity.
The device in question, along with the other one it just surpassed, both are concentrators: they have big optic systems focussing light on small silicon PV cells. The whole point of this area of research was, originally, to reduce the cost per watt -- you make more optics, which are cheap, so the same amount of photovoltaic, the expensive part, sees more sunlight. It's a nice side-effect that it's more efficient, because photovoltaics are nonlinear, but the original reason people were looking at these was precisely to lower the cost-per-watt, and that's really what's important about this research.
The most recent material I've seen from NREL research indicates the payback time for currently-available solar cells is about 10 years, which is still not bad, given that they have at least a 20 year lifetime. If someone else has a link or other numbers I'd be interested in hearing them.
But there *isn't* any difference between D and R: they're both human. By which I mean, it depends on how you define 'differences' - and when. Americans, by and large, seem to understand that power corrupts, and reflect that by looking at who is in charge and regarding them as corrupt -- which, by and large, is pretty accurate. As such, right now, most of us are looking at the Republicans and saying that things are just appalling. When Democrats have a firm grip on all three branches of the government and are committing excesses , we'll be appalled at them. I happen to believe that this is the most appalling group of politicians in the White House since Harding, or maybe even earlier, but I believe it's a matter of degree, that if a bunch of Democrats were running things when there was a national emergency and everyone put on the government-can-do-no-wrong-protecting-us blinkers, that they'd do a bunch of foul and terrifying things in a somewhat different direction. I doubt they'd go anywhere nearly as far as the current Administration has gone, for a number of reasons, but they'd still be appalling. At the end of the day, anyone who is running things and has insufficient oversight will misuse the granted powers. (I believe that the 'insufficient oversight' is the important angle, by the way, but that's not really relevant to this discussion.)
>So who cares if US colleges raise the cost of engineering degrees, or if US students stop taking engineering majors? The same MBA's that offshored IT work are the same ones who will see nothing wrong with offshoring engineering when they find out it's cheaper that way as well.
Of course, we can also outsource the business administration. When *that* happens, expect sparks, and then we'll see some laws suddenly become absolutely critical to national security, laws like how anyone involved in managing companies has to be a US citizen. It won't, of course, do anything wild and crazy like expanding those same protections to engineers, technicians, or blue-collar assembly-line workers. But once all the manufacturing technology and research infrastructure has gone overseas, well, they'll assemble their own MBA's and ours will be left to manage nonproductive shells.
>The smart students will simply enter the school as art history majors and take lots of engineering courses as electives, and then later switch their major.
In every school I've attended, the smart administrators of the engineering college don't allow you to register for courses unless you're a declared engineering major. Until about 1992 you could get play games with programming courses to sneak into a computer science degree this way, but at the two colleges I know well enough speak authoritatively, both have done the same with CS within the last decade.
>Anybody with a library and curiosity can learn all the art history they want to, it's not particularly difficult, nor do you need to pay a college tuition to have a discussion about it.
Oh, absolutely. That's how I'm working as an electrical engineer, having never taken a college course in electronics: I had a library and curiosity. With that said, having dated a couple art history PhD's, if you'd like to do original research in a field, rather than just have a nice little discussion over brie and crackers, well, then, you need some college, and more particularly, rigorous study, discussion with educated peers, and defense of your ideas in front of other PhD's. Like engineering, art history is difficult, and if you want to advance the art, you are probably not going to get very far with an afternoon's reading on Wikipedia.
I remember that during my days in such a coaching institute, I was taught, in a very rigorous and scientific manner, how to maximise my score on a given test. How to guess, when to guess, what to guess, how to eliminate wrong answers even if you know absolutely nothing of what is actually being asked (do a dimensional analysis on the answers, eliminate the ones not matching the dimensions of the desired quantity (we learnt the dimensional formulae of common physical quantities by heart), and eliminate the ones which are absurd or lead to absurd results, do an order of magnitude test and eliminate ridiculous results), and lots of things like that.
You know, I think that this is the essence of classical engineering: this talent is *exactly* the talent that engineers should have. The person who can derive the formula for the bending moment of a girder from first principles and then calculate the required dimensions for a specific girder made of a specific material in a specific application is very valuable, but the person who can look at that calculation and say "dude, I think you're missing a decimal point" is at least as valuable, if not moreso. The critical skill of a good engineer is judgment, and things like dimensional analysis, order-of-magnitude, and elimination of ridiculous results are examples of judgment.
I don't disagree with your post -- your points are good. But what you're talking about in this specific case is, I think, an example of an area that distinguishes engineers from scientists and researchers. Engineers use their experience to convert science into something that works, and their experience is what makes it work. The skills you deride as test-passing skills are also making-things-work skills. You're describing an engineer engineering a test answer.
In Colorado, at least, 'Good Samaritan' laws mean that if you try to help someone who is injured, they must provide very high standards of evidence to try and sue you if something goes awry, to address exactly this situation. No side-effect of aid offered in good faith will get you in trouble. It's more questionable if you do something that's really stupid -- using a penknife to try and hack a hole in someone's throat for breathing when the person's actually having an epileptic seizure, for instance -- but I haven't read/heard about anyone managing to sue even for those sorts of situations.
I have several friends who are EMT's and have told me about situations like your mugger, though in the stories they've told me, they've been working on resuscitating someone after being knifed or shot, and the assailant comes back, orders them out of the way, and shoots the victim again. What reinforces my belief that most severe violence is personal and irrational is that in every case i've heard, the assailant has little or no interaction with the emergency personnel: just walks up, shoots the victim again, and walks off, with no attempt to be sneaky or get rid of other witnesses.
There's a fair bit of difference between DNA and RNA. DNA uses thymine while RNA uses uracil. Likewise, RNA uses ribose as the sugar that bonds each nucleotide to the next, while DNA uses deoxyribose -- which is just a single atom change, an addition of an oxygen between a hydrogen and a carbon. But then again, the difference between the flammable heating gas ethane and alcohol is also just an oxygen added between a carbon and a hydrogen, so that's kind of a big deal. Now, just looking at it, you'll say it's just a methyl group, 4 atoms where otherwise there was only 1. But the thing is: uracil is thermodynamically cheaper than thymine so if you're building a buttload of protein you probably want to use the cheaper base as your RNA, but since cytosine spontaneously decays into uracil, which is cytosine's opposite, if you have a gene information saving system based on cytosine and uracil, you'll slowly end up with a lot more uracils, and the faulty bits will be propagated into the daughter cells of the original cell. By using cytosine and thymine, every time the DNA replication process finds a uracil, it knows that a cytosine used to be there and replaces it with a new cytosine. Using thymine provides an error-correction code, in essence.
My answer to why all organisms have basically the same mechanism is because it's wildly successful. Ernst Meyr and others did calculations on competitive advantages, and as I recall, some stupidly small advantage, like 0.1% increased reproduction rate, would lead to near-complete expression of that trait through a population in a few dozen generations. Sorry I don't have an exact ref: I'm recalling this from a book I read six months ago about Meyr and a couple of his cronies and British genetics in general. Anyway, if you had an initial group of things that were more or less self-replicating -- they exhibited growth and division, and the children reflected the characteristics of the parent -- and then you multiplied by a billion years, I don't think it's at all surprising that one set of traits utterly overwhelmed others.
With that said, I would not be surprised to find other forms of life on Earth, as we get better at looking at and *recognizing* systems. Prions are interesting things. I don't know that I'd call them life, but they're replicating and spreading, and they don't have very much in common with 'life' other than protein. I think they're degenerate forms of 'life' but I also think it's possible we'll find something else, or many other things, that are replicating but aren't even vaguely similar to dna/protein/micelle-based life.
Well, this is essentially the iTunes issue. You *can* search all sorts of dangerous sites for Windows codecs, risking who knows what malware, or you can do the same thing on linux with comparative impunity, or you can pay a few dollars for a program that already has the capability. It's been my experience that almost everyone opts for the third option. My point is that it has nothing to do with the illegality of downloaded codecs, but with the hassle of finding and configuring them, even when it's as simple as apt-get. People are *still* willing to pay to avoid using command-line (which is pretty disappointing.)
I have maybe a dozen friends who have told me that they would use some linux distro regularly (after seeing what I'm using) specifically because my system plays/rips almost anything, except that they don't want to deal with having to go find and set up (flash, win32 codecs, decss...) It's not the illegality, it's the perceived hassle. They *want* free codecs -- which is to say the illegality is, in a way, an advantage -- but they'll pay to have it all done for them. When I talk about making a distro that already has all the codecs installed, they say "I'd use that in a heartbeat."
Bruce Schneier has written about this, as have other people. Basically, if you don't have a reliable metric for assessing something, it is human nature to take the closest available metric and try and interpolate the data you're looking for. It's not that people are stupid or even that people are uneducated: it's an unconscious, maybe even instinctive judgment process. If you ask a young child (2 years old-ish) whether she'd rather have a big piece of chocolate, or a smaller piece cut into many little tiny chunks and spread out over the plate, the child will usually pick the smaller piece because it looks larger since it's spread out. Same thing going on with electronics or cars: if you're living a reasonably active life, you probably don't have time to be an expert car mechanic, operating system troubleshooter, electrical engineer, woodworker, biochemist, and dietician, so you buy cars, computers, sound equipment, furniture, prescription drugs and food based on appearance and price, since that's all you have to go on.
I've had several interesting discussions with women who were offended that I started talking to them just because they were pretty. My response was "well, that's the only thing I knew about you, so what other reason could I honestly claim?" (Actual honesty doesn't really get you very far, by the way. And please don't take this as some sort of screed about/against women: when I talk to people online I talk to the interesting ones, because again, that's the only thing I have to go on. The medium determines the judgment.)
This is only sort of related to *production* of fuel, but Denver International Airport produces 70% of the fuel used at DIA through oil wells on the airport property. I can't find a supporting cite, but this at least indicates DIA has 53 gas/oil wells. The refineries are a few miles away, but I believe they're connected by pipeline both ways, since the DIA fuel farm is near the refineries.
And while we're at it we can go back to using floatplanes and flying boats, so we can always land directly upwind, with the added benefit that crash landings in water are actually not too bad and it sure does reduce the fire danger.
There was a time when most serious research on aircraft was done with seaplanes, because it was assumed that it made sense to use water as runways (hence Howard Hughes and his Spruce Goose.)
>But they will only be able to use the data for national security purposes and not to fight ordinary crime, the Home Office stressed.
I wonder how long that'll last... which is to say, I wonder for how long they've already been using the data to at least track ordinary crime, just waiting for the general public to give up caring enough that they can use the reams of data they've collected with impunity. Or whether we, over here in the USA, will even find out that this kind of technology exists and is being used.
Anything the government can use against its citizens, it probably already is, and if not, it's only because of technical limitations they're busily trying to fix.
This is an example of Schneier Syndrome: if it's news, you don't have to worry about it because it's so uncommon as to still be worth writing about. The things you have to worry about are the things nobody bothers to mention because they're so ubiquitous: windows malware. Bruce Schneier makes the original argument in the context of child abductions and death by car crash, but it's equally valid for this situation. People always underestimate the threat of familiar or common dangers, and overestimate the threat of rare catastrophes.
That's interesting and really cool! In response to the original post, I think young animals of any species are somewhat scared of everything unless their parents show them that it's okay, and then after a while (at about age 2 in humans) they become not really scared of anything -- their exploration phase -- and investigate everything. But now I wonder about fear of spiders being less universal than I thought.
Here's an interesting intelligence/development test to try. Take a large mirror -- at least a meter on a side -- and put it in the middle of the floor, facing upwards. Put a toy or treat in the middle of it. See how a newborn puppy, kitten, or baby reacts. It's been my experience that a puppy or kitten has to be at least five months old, and a child has to be at least crawling well, before they'll let you put them anywhere near that mirror without serious attempts to get away. It's a rare dog, even fully grown, that will overcome its fear of falling in a hole enough to try touching the mirror in efforts to get the snacks. My mom's dog won't go within a meter of this, while my brother's extremely bright dog will walk up, sniff, carefully touch the edge of the mirror with a paw, then very carefully lean out, keeping three legs off the mirror and only putting one on, to try and get the snacks. I've only gotten to try this with three children; none who were too young to speak would have anything to do with the mirror no matter how tempting the prize until they were about 2 years old, and even then one was deeply suspicious of the whole affair.
Oh. I also have yet to see a kid or a cat/dog that wasn't freaked right out by the sight of a tarantula, but I haven't gotten to experiment as much with that, especially with babies, for some reason.
1. Diamond? WTF is diamond doing in the title? Cubic zirconia's nothing like diamond unless you believe the ads of people trying to sell you rings with CZ's in them. (And if you've played with gemstones, you might be able to spot those with your bare eyes: they have a 10% different index of refraction of light.
2. Zirconia has been used for a fuel cell 'catalyst' for a while. Here's a reference to a two-year-old paper about a related fuel cell system.
3. I say 'catalyst' in the above, because zirconia's only sort of a catalyst. While the zirconia remains more or less zirconia, it's not just offering a surface for reaction chemistry: it's actually exchanging oxygen with the reactants during the reaction.
4. Still, it's interesting and weird that the electrical potential is being transferred by protons, rather than electrons (as per TFA.) I'm not familiar with that, just with holes and electrons, so that bears more reading.
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The first time I heard a Christina Aguilera song I knew she was going to be big. Ditto Pink, and to a lesser extent Avril Lavigne.
*YOU* are still listening to The Who and Led Zep, but I've heard my girlfriend's friends say "who?" when I mention them, and I've heard radio callins where teens and people in their early twenties were saying that The Who and Led Zep had no more relevance than Buddy Holly or Billie Holiday. In twenty years, those kids will be listening to Pink and Christina and complaining about how all new music sucks.
I don't really understand what you're arguing, frankly. If you consider 'quality' to be mega-stars then Led Zep, U2, and Britney all have quality. If you consider quality to be 'music that people will listen to in twenty years' -- as much as I hate to say it, I bet there'll be a lot of people still listening to Britney because that's what they listened to when they were forming their musical influences. Modest Mouse and Arcade Fire started out as indie acts that nobody had ever heard of -- I first ran across MM like seven years ago -- and now they're touring some of the larger venues in the US and getting songs and albums well up in the top twenty charts. Does that mean they suck, because they're mega-stars? Does that mean they have quality? Does that mean people will listen to them in twenty years? The first two depend on your definition and the third depends on what happens in the next 20 years. But defining 'classic' in the present tense is a contradiction in terms.
The basic idea of justice in all of Western civilization is that it is proportional: the punishment should fit the crime. That's why Americans react poorly to news of women being stoned for adultery or petty thieves having their hands cut off.
I cannot see how sitting in a cage for ten years is 'damage equal to the damage he caused'. What's your secret equation for calculating how long someone sits in a cage to be equal to murder, or car theft, or copying songs? How, in other words, can you draw any sort of equivalence between completely non-equivalent acts?
It sounds like you would really have enjoyed medieval England, where they did torture people before killing them. In public. It was a form of amusement. Oddly enough, they had far higher levels of crime then than now, despite that. Funny thing about humans: they're really bad at calculating risk/rewards and cost/benefit analysis, and as such, harsh sentencing doesn't seem to have very much deterrent effect, according to a couple thousand years' data.
I have some friends with PhD's in nuclear science who claim that radiation is beneficial. They go further: life started when there was a lot more radiation, so most of our genetic machinery is designed to work with far higher radiation than what we're seeing, which is to say we can stand a lot more radiation with little harm. They go further and claim that because there's less radiation now, we have more problems -- higher background radiation might act to suppress immune system malfunctions (sitting in radioactive hot springs does seem to reduce the symptoms of arthritis.) Life survival vs. number of cells should be inversely proportional as radiation level rises: if a bacterium has its DNA badly injured by a radiative event, it's less likely to survive than an animal with a million cells. (I've read in other places that every strand of DNA in every cell experiences tens of damage events requiring repair every day.) My friends the PhD's go so far as to claim that the reason that the seven counties in the US with the longest average lifespan are all on the Continental Divide in Colorado where the radiation levels are highest because of the elevation.
(Sorry I can't find a better link for the Eight Americas dataset: you have to download an Excel spreadsheet to get the raw data.)
Basically what we're talking about here is a type of compression algorithm. A person lives an average of 75 years, and for purposes of this discussion, let's assume the person is youngish, since they're more likely to commit crimes. Say 25 years. That means that a 50 year sentence is essentially the maximum useful sentence -- it is equivalent to life in prison. So the *worst* crime imaginable would map to this -- the one where you kill everyone in the world by sexually assaulting them with kittens and then peeing on their dead bodies while singing heavy metal ballads.
A proportional justice system means that anything less than this ultimate crime, should have a lesser sentence.
From there, it's just a question of how you map things -- is it linear or logarithmic with the severity of the crime (since causing a crash that injures two people is only 1/100000000 as bad as killing everyone in the world with kittens, should your sentence for doing this be only 1/100000000 as long as a life sentence, or only 1/1000?) What level of crime is sufficient that anything above it maps to life in prison? How much will that cost?
To the victim, any sentence probably seems too lenient, because the victim has been personally affected. The questions are: what is best for society as a whole, and what are we actually trying to do with imprisonment?
Fundamentalists (which I use in its original meaning) and many conservatives feel that criminality is permanent, and as such, prisons are primarily punishment, retribution, or a way of getting rid of criminals if we can't outright kill them. As a result, they tend to want very long prison sentences or the death penalty.
Progressives, and most liberals, feel that criminality is situational, and as such, prisons can be used for rehabilitation, so that once the sentence is served, with appropriate help and training, the person coming out is possibly no longer a criminal and can live a useful, productive, non-criminal life.
Basically, you have to ask yourself what you think prison is for. If it's for making people suffer for having done bad things, you're probably going to want long sentences and capital punishment. If it's for fixing broken people, you're probably going to favor shorter sentences and definitely going to favor education, job training, and self-advancement opportunities being offered in prisons. Victims of crime are naturally going to feel retributive towards the criminals who caused them suffering, and probably towards criminals in general. I personally think that one of the responsibilities of society at large is to approach crime with a neutral point of view, and make sentencing depend on what's best for society as a whole, rather than just to appease the feelings of the victim.
>In music I have been watching the VH-1 classic music channel, and it is interesting: 50-60's rock, 70's hippies, 80's bad hair day, 90's all against the world, 2000's? Paris Hilton? Britany Spears? You have got to be kidding me. Yes there are good artists in 2000, but they are not gaining the traction that good artists used to get.
And in 10 years, someone just like you will be writing, "the 00's? Alternative... but the '10's? Who is any good? NOBODY. Yeah, there are okay artists today, but nothing like the ones we had just ten years ago."
You're watching the *classic* movie channel. Ask yourself what *classic* means, and part of the definition will certainly be "withstands the test of time". Of course there aren't any classic things from the last five years, because they're still new.
The problem I think you're trying to address is encapsulated in "not gaining the traction that good artists used to get" and that, in my opinion, is a strength of the Internet, not a failing. Think of this as being something like information asymmetry, where the seller knows more about the product than the buyer, so can use that knowledge to manipulate the price to the seller's advantage. In a similar way, when the only means for the buyer to find music is by a push technology, the seller determines the market, but as the market changes to a pull technology, it is *possible* for anyone to hear any band. It doesn't happen uniformly, but it could. So what DOES happen is that people, instead of relying just on what they hear on the radio, begin to rely on what other people listen to (popularity lists) and what their friends are listening to. This makes the market vastly broader, so many more bands are getting exposure, and the consumer's money is A: better spent (more music per dollar, especially with single-track downloads) and B: more widely spent, meaning fewer mega-rock-stars.
While I'm at it, I'm not going to argue that Britney's a great artist, but twenty years ago I wouldn't've argued that Cher or Captain&Tenniele (or however you spell it) were great artists either, and they sure were selling a mess of albums.
I think that's part of it, but here's the thing: if a kid only ever eats pizza throughout childhood, the kid's going to end up as an adult who mostly eats pizza. If a kid is exposed to LOTS and LOTS of different foods, the kid's going to have a much wider range of interests as an adult, and is consequently going to be less likely to accept only having pizza. That leads to discontented people. In a small community, marrying someone and spending your life with that person is not only a really good idea, it might be the only option you have, and is certainly the option that's best for the community. The larger the community, and the more options that you perceive you have, the less likely you are to stick with one option. I think that, in a nutshell, is a major driving force for the rise of divorce, serial monogamy, and other modern ills. I think people have been messing around throughout history, but for much of history it wasn't a socially acceptable option to mess around as a lifestyle.
Plus, there's a biological drive to sow oats widely, so I'm not sure it's really possible for this particular appetite to be sated, only to choose not to act on impulses.
Whenever the 'sex before marriage' argument or its like comes up, I always ask "do you drive a car before you buy it?" People usually splutter. One time a guy said "yeah, that's a good counter-argument. Now tell me where you shop for toothbrushes so I can never, ever shop there again."
As a more serious response, if most men are like I am, it doesn't matter *how* much wild-oat-sowing you do, you'll still be wondering what that pretty woman who just walked by would be like. In fact, it's been my experience that the more wild oats, the more I wonder about the next potential opportunity.
The device in question, along with the other one it just surpassed, both are concentrators: they have big optic systems focussing light on small silicon PV cells. The whole point of this area of research was, originally, to reduce the cost per watt -- you make more optics, which are cheap, so the same amount of photovoltaic, the expensive part, sees more sunlight. It's a nice side-effect that it's more efficient, because photovoltaics are nonlinear, but the original reason people were looking at these was precisely to lower the cost-per-watt, and that's really what's important about this research.
The most recent material I've seen from NREL research indicates the payback time for currently-available solar cells is about 10 years, which is still not bad, given that they have at least a 20 year lifetime. If someone else has a link or other numbers I'd be interested in hearing them.
But there *isn't* any difference between D and R: they're both human.
By which I mean, it depends on how you define 'differences' - and when.
Americans, by and large, seem to understand that power corrupts, and reflect that by looking at who is in charge and regarding them as corrupt -- which, by and large, is pretty accurate. As such, right now, most of us are looking at the Republicans and saying that things are just appalling. When Democrats have a firm grip on all three branches of the government and are committing excesses , we'll be appalled at them. I happen to believe that this is the most appalling group of politicians in the White House since Harding, or maybe even earlier, but I believe it's a matter of degree, that if a bunch of Democrats were running things when there was a national emergency and everyone put on the government-can-do-no-wrong-protecting-us blinkers, that they'd do a bunch of foul and terrifying things in a somewhat different direction. I doubt they'd go anywhere nearly as far as the current Administration has gone, for a number of reasons, but they'd still be appalling. At the end of the day, anyone who is running things and has insufficient oversight will misuse the granted powers. (I believe that the 'insufficient oversight' is the important angle, by the way, but that's not really relevant to this discussion.)
>So who cares if US colleges raise the cost of engineering degrees, or if US students stop taking engineering majors? The same MBA's that offshored IT work are the same ones who will see nothing wrong with offshoring engineering when they find out it's cheaper that way as well.
Of course, we can also outsource the business administration.
When *that* happens, expect sparks, and then we'll see some laws suddenly become absolutely critical to national security, laws like how anyone involved in managing companies has to be a US citizen. It won't, of course, do anything wild and crazy like expanding those same protections to engineers, technicians, or blue-collar assembly-line workers. But once all the manufacturing technology and research infrastructure has gone overseas, well, they'll assemble their own MBA's and ours will be left to manage nonproductive shells.
>The smart students will simply enter the school as art history majors and take lots of engineering courses as electives, and then later switch their major.
In every school I've attended, the smart administrators of the engineering college don't allow you to register for courses unless you're a declared engineering major. Until about 1992 you could get play games with programming courses to sneak into a computer science degree this way, but at the two colleges I know well enough speak authoritatively, both have done the same with CS within the last decade.
>Anybody with a library and curiosity can learn all the art history they want to, it's not particularly difficult, nor do you need to pay a college tuition to have a discussion about it.
Oh, absolutely. That's how I'm working as an electrical engineer, having never taken a college course in electronics: I had a library and curiosity.
With that said, having dated a couple art history PhD's, if you'd like to do original research in a field, rather than just have a nice little discussion over brie and crackers, well, then, you need some college, and more particularly, rigorous study, discussion with educated peers, and defense of your ideas in front of other PhD's. Like engineering, art history is difficult, and if you want to advance the art, you are probably not going to get very far with an afternoon's reading on Wikipedia.
I remember that during my days in such a coaching institute, I was taught, in a very rigorous and scientific manner, how to maximise my score on a given test. How to guess, when to guess, what to guess, how to eliminate wrong answers even if you know absolutely nothing of what is actually being asked (do a dimensional analysis on the answers, eliminate the ones not matching the dimensions of the desired quantity (we learnt the dimensional formulae of common physical quantities by heart), and eliminate the ones which are absurd or lead to absurd results, do an order of magnitude test and eliminate ridiculous results), and lots of things like that.
You know, I think that this is the essence of classical engineering: this talent is *exactly* the talent that engineers should have. The person who can derive the formula for the bending moment of a girder from first principles and then calculate the required dimensions for a specific girder made of a specific material in a specific application is very valuable, but the person who can look at that calculation and say "dude, I think you're missing a decimal point" is at least as valuable, if not moreso. The critical skill of a good engineer is judgment, and things like dimensional analysis, order-of-magnitude, and elimination of ridiculous results are examples of judgment.
I don't disagree with your post -- your points are good. But what you're talking about in this specific case is, I think, an example of an area that distinguishes engineers from scientists and researchers. Engineers use their experience to convert science into something that works, and their experience is what makes it work. The skills you deride as test-passing skills are also making-things-work skills. You're describing an engineer engineering a test answer.
In Colorado, at least, 'Good Samaritan' laws mean that if you try to help someone who is injured, they must provide very high standards of evidence to try and sue you if something goes awry, to address exactly this situation. No side-effect of aid offered in good faith will get you in trouble. It's more questionable if you do something that's really stupid -- using a penknife to try and hack a hole in someone's throat for breathing when the person's actually having an epileptic seizure, for instance -- but I haven't read/heard about anyone managing to sue even for those sorts of situations.
I have several friends who are EMT's and have told me about situations like your mugger, though in the stories they've told me, they've been working on resuscitating someone after being knifed or shot, and the assailant comes back, orders them out of the way, and shoots the victim again. What reinforces my belief that most severe violence is personal and irrational is that in every case i've heard, the assailant has little or no interaction with the emergency personnel: just walks up, shoots the victim again, and walks off, with no attempt to be sneaky or get rid of other witnesses.
There's a fair bit of difference between DNA and RNA. DNA uses thymine while RNA uses uracil. Likewise, RNA uses ribose as the sugar that bonds each nucleotide to the next, while DNA uses deoxyribose -- which is just a single atom change, an addition of an oxygen between a hydrogen and a carbon. But then again, the difference between the flammable heating gas ethane and alcohol is also just an oxygen added between a carbon and a hydrogen, so that's kind of a big deal. Now, just looking at it, you'll say it's just a methyl group, 4 atoms where otherwise there was only 1. But the thing is: uracil is thermodynamically cheaper than thymine so if you're building a buttload of protein you probably want to use the cheaper base as your RNA, but since cytosine spontaneously decays into uracil, which is cytosine's opposite, if you have a gene information saving system based on cytosine and uracil, you'll slowly end up with a lot more uracils, and the faulty bits will be propagated into the daughter cells of the original cell. By using cytosine and thymine, every time the DNA replication process finds a uracil, it knows that a cytosine used to be there and replaces it with a new cytosine. Using thymine provides an error-correction code, in essence.
My answer to why all organisms have basically the same mechanism is because it's wildly successful. Ernst Meyr and others did calculations on competitive advantages, and as I recall, some stupidly small advantage, like 0.1% increased reproduction rate, would lead to near-complete expression of that trait through a population in a few dozen generations. Sorry I don't have an exact ref: I'm recalling this from a book I read six months ago about Meyr and a couple of his cronies and British genetics in general. Anyway, if you had an initial group of things that were more or less self-replicating -- they exhibited growth and division, and the children reflected the characteristics of the parent -- and then you multiplied by a billion years, I don't think it's at all surprising that one set of traits utterly overwhelmed others.
With that said, I would not be surprised to find other forms of life on Earth, as we get better at looking at and *recognizing* systems. Prions are interesting things. I don't know that I'd call them life, but they're replicating and spreading, and they don't have very much in common with 'life' other than protein. I think they're degenerate forms of 'life' but I also think it's possible we'll find something else, or many other things, that are replicating but aren't even vaguely similar to dna/protein/micelle-based life.
Well, this is essentially the iTunes issue. You *can* search all sorts of dangerous sites for Windows codecs, risking who knows what malware, or you can do the same thing on linux with comparative impunity, or you can pay a few dollars for a program that already has the capability. It's been my experience that almost everyone opts for the third option. My point is that it has nothing to do with the illegality of downloaded codecs, but with the hassle of finding and configuring them, even when it's as simple as apt-get. People are *still* willing to pay to avoid using command-line (which is pretty disappointing.)
I have maybe a dozen friends who have told me that they would use some linux distro regularly (after seeing what I'm using) specifically because my system plays/rips almost anything, except that they don't want to deal with having to go find and set up (flash, win32 codecs, decss...) It's not the illegality, it's the perceived hassle. They *want* free codecs -- which is to say the illegality is, in a way, an advantage -- but they'll pay to have it all done for them. When I talk about making a distro that already has all the codecs installed, they say "I'd use that in a heartbeat."
Bruce Schneier has written about this, as have other people. Basically, if you don't have a reliable metric for assessing something, it is human nature to take the closest available metric and try and interpolate the data you're looking for. It's not that people are stupid or even that people are uneducated: it's an unconscious, maybe even instinctive judgment process. If you ask a young child (2 years old-ish) whether she'd rather have a big piece of chocolate, or a smaller piece cut into many little tiny chunks and spread out over the plate, the child will usually pick the smaller piece because it looks larger since it's spread out. Same thing going on with electronics or cars: if you're living a reasonably active life, you probably don't have time to be an expert car mechanic, operating system troubleshooter, electrical engineer, woodworker, biochemist, and dietician, so you buy cars, computers, sound equipment, furniture, prescription drugs and food based on appearance and price, since that's all you have to go on.
I've had several interesting discussions with women who were offended that I started talking to them just because they were pretty. My response was "well, that's the only thing I knew about you, so what other reason could I honestly claim?" (Actual honesty doesn't really get you very far, by the way. And please don't take this as some sort of screed about/against women: when I talk to people online I talk to the interesting ones, because again, that's the only thing I have to go on. The medium determines the judgment.)
This is only sort of related to *production* of fuel, but Denver International Airport produces 70% of the fuel used at DIA through oil wells on the airport property. I can't find a supporting cite, but this at least indicates DIA has 53 gas/oil wells. The refineries are a few miles away, but I believe they're connected by pipeline both ways, since the DIA fuel farm is near the refineries.
And while we're at it we can go back to using floatplanes and flying boats, so we can always land directly upwind, with the added benefit that crash landings in water are actually not too bad and it sure does reduce the fire danger.
There was a time when most serious research on aircraft was done with seaplanes, because it was assumed that it made sense to use water as runways (hence Howard Hughes and his Spruce Goose.)
>But they will only be able to use the data for national security purposes and not to fight ordinary crime, the Home Office stressed.
I wonder how long that'll last... which is to say, I wonder for how long they've already been using the data to at least track ordinary crime, just waiting for the general public to give up caring enough that they can use the reams of data they've collected with impunity. Or whether we, over here in the USA, will even find out that this kind of technology exists and is being used.
Anything the government can use against its citizens, it probably already is, and if not, it's only because of technical limitations they're busily trying to fix.
This is an example of Schneier Syndrome: if it's news, you don't have to worry about it because it's so uncommon as to still be worth writing about. The things you have to worry about are the things nobody bothers to mention because they're so ubiquitous: windows malware. Bruce Schneier makes the original argument in the context of child abductions and death by car crash, but it's equally valid for this situation.
People always underestimate the threat of familiar or common dangers, and overestimate the threat of rare catastrophes.
That's interesting and really cool! In response to the original post, I think young animals of any species are somewhat scared of everything unless their parents show them that it's okay, and then after a while (at about age 2 in humans) they become not really scared of anything -- their exploration phase -- and investigate everything. But now I wonder about fear of spiders being less universal than I thought.
Here's an interesting intelligence/development test to try. Take a large mirror -- at least a meter on a side -- and put it in the middle of the floor, facing upwards. Put a toy or treat in the middle of it. See how a newborn puppy, kitten, or baby reacts. It's been my experience that a puppy or kitten has to be at least five months old, and a child has to be at least crawling well, before they'll let you put them anywhere near that mirror without serious attempts to get away. It's a rare dog, even fully grown, that will overcome its fear of falling in a hole enough to try touching the mirror in efforts to get the snacks. My mom's dog won't go within a meter of this, while my brother's extremely bright dog will walk up, sniff, carefully touch the edge of the mirror with a paw, then very carefully lean out, keeping three legs off the mirror and only putting one on, to try and get the snacks. I've only gotten to try this with three children; none who were too young to speak would have anything to do with the mirror no matter how tempting the prize until they were about 2 years old, and even then one was deeply suspicious of the whole affair.
Oh. I also have yet to see a kid or a cat/dog that wasn't freaked right out by the sight of a tarantula, but I haven't gotten to experiment as much with that, especially with babies, for some reason.
1. Diamond? WTF is diamond doing in the title? Cubic zirconia's nothing like diamond unless you believe the ads of people trying to sell you rings with CZ's in them. (And if you've played with gemstones, you might be able to spot those with your bare eyes: they have a 10% different index of refraction of light.
2. Zirconia has been used for a fuel cell 'catalyst' for a while. Here's a reference to a two-year-old paper about a related fuel cell system.
3. I say 'catalyst' in the above, because zirconia's only sort of a catalyst. While the zirconia remains more or less zirconia, it's not just offering a surface for reaction chemistry: it's actually exchanging oxygen with the reactants during the reaction.
4. Still, it's interesting and weird that the electrical potential is being transferred by protons, rather than electrons (as per TFA.) I'm not familiar with that, just with holes and electrons, so that bears more reading.