>Name one other religion that refuses to open its documents so someone can look at them WITHOUT you having to pay to see them.
How about the Mormons? Note that I *like* the Mormon faith in many ways, and don't intend this as a criticism of the faith, but the Church has spent a lot of money buying up documents about early Mormon history so that they disappear and stop being inconvenient.
I worked in big manufacturing for a while. You really want those buttons to be as quick to hit as possible. We had a dozen excimer lasers and when something went wrong, wrong generally meant one was leaking fluorine gas. When that alarm went off, you didn't inhale: you ran for the door and hoped the air you had in your lungs would last until you got outside. Not so much time for twist-and-pull. What we *did* have was EPO buttons that were recessed, with a sort of cuff around them, so that nothing could fall and trigger them, technicians wouldn't press them by mistake while leaning over the machine to work on optics replacement, stuff like that. However, if you were sitting on top of the machine working on an optics tower, say, and your legs were hanging down the side of the machine, and you were to try to scootch around to get to the upper turning mirror by waving your legs about, your heel was certainly sufficient to fit in the collar around the EPO and push it... damn.
I do the same thing you do, and that's the reasonable way to drive, I think. As best I know, that's the most efficient way: once you see the light turn red, the best you can possibly do is stop using gas right then. My original assertion is that their claims for their driving setup, and its look-ahead features, don't take into account other cars and their behavior, which I think is the major obstacle we're facing when we're driving. Their system works very well for a car by itself on an empty road, but they can't rely on optimized coasting strategies or optimized acceleration strategies because the way other drivers drive will eliminate most of those gains.
With all that said, from the numbers I've seen, a small car driving 35 mph is producing something like 15 horsepower or less, which is burning less than a gallon an hour. I should be able to be more precise: if we assume the car has a brake specific fuel consumption of 0.45 from here, that means we'd be burning 15*.45 = 7 pounds of fuel an hour -- which is just over a gallon. (I didn't realize it was that much.) In any case, we're talking the other dude spending maybe an extra twenty seconds burning gas, at a gallon an hour, for a fuel savings for you of, what, 1/180 of a gallon? I grant you that builds up over time, but 0.5% is a hard way to make a profit... That first link claimed that more than 50% of your gas was used in acceleration. That might be true for fairly rural driving, but in city driving I bet it's more like 65%, and for the idiots who stomp the gas to the floor at every stoplight, which apparently a lot of automatic-transmission drivers do (I make this claim by sometimes matching the acceleration of the car beside me, and my not-too-slow car requiring near-full-out gas and hard shifting to stay with sedans driven by not-trying-to-race people) it's probably higher yet.
The amount of gas used is highly dependent on how fast you accelerate, and linearly dependent on how long you go at that speed. My point was that if you do burn-and-coast, you have no cruise at all, and if you decrease your acceleration during the burn phase so that you get to a top speed that'll give you exactly enough kinetic energy to get to your next stop, then your overall efficiency is based purely on what that top speed is, because your acceleration will determine that top speed. Coasting doesn't lose energy, it just reflects wasted energy during the burn phase: once it's been wasted, it remains wasted (although some can be reclaimed through regen brakes.)
I've always been curious about the Prius friction brakes. The efficiency and efficacy of dynamic braking looks to me like it'd drop off linearly as speed dropped. Do the friction brakes run the whole time, or do they cut in at some point, or do they just steadily dissipate increasing amounts of energy?
Yes, several experiments with living contents survived the Columbia crash, including several simple cans full of nematode worms that survived 2300G impacts. Consider that the most likely sterilizing agent will be heat, and the fragments will, as you say, be going much faster than Columbia was: the heat on the leading edge extremely high (vaporizing) but the heat in crevices much lower because of the thermal conductivity of the material. If it's going fast and makes it to ground without burning up, they're more likely to survive than when it's on an initially surviveable glide path.
For the record, it's (near) sterile when it's still in the bladder but there are bacteria, protozoans, or whatever the host animal has living around the urethra and quite likely somewhat within it, that'll contaminate the urine as it leaves the body, and some of them will survive the high urea concentration and begin multiplying in the urine after a while. Likewise, there are scads of bacteria on the body, particularly in That Area, and physical contact with That Area is going to transfer stuff to your hands.
But it's all a distraction anyway: the stuff living under your fingernails is vibrant and very nearly impossible to wipe out, even with serious medical-quality washing. A three-minute multiple-pass wash, that doctors do between seeing patients, kills about 80% of the viable bacteria living in the under-fingernail environment (source: personal research done while getting my microbiology degree, also discussed in Atul Gawande's book "Better" with similar numbers) so if they weren't using gloves, there's plenty of stuff getting through.
1. Put this tech on hybrids, instead of attacking them for only being as good as this tech.
2. Once you're at speed, all braking is loss (unless you have regenerative braking.) So coasting slooooooooooowly to a stop wastes no more energy than coasting right up to the stop and then stopping suddenly. It's harder on your brakes, but it doesn't waste your gasoline. I haven't seen any discussion of this, but I assume that with regenerative braking, you recover more energy from a rapid stop than a slow one since less energy is lost in rolling friction.
Now, the presumption in #2 is that you're not staying on the gas once you've seen that you have to stop for something ahead. Which also means that whenever you see you have to stop, you take your foot off the gas, in which case you'll always be coasting slooooooooowly to a stop.
So let's address the *actual* problems with traffic flow. If you're sitting at a stoplight and you start off, seeing that the next stoplight is red, to minimize your fuel usage you do lookahead driving and accelerate very slowly to the speed that will allow you to coast and stop at the next stoplight. By so doing, you piss off all the other people in traffic behind you, and since people don't like to do that, they don't accelerate that way. Also, when you're sloooooooooowly coasting to a stop, based on your energy management assumptions, a half-dozen cars who took off fast and are now in the other lane will pull into your lane, thus pushing your stop point well forwards and causing you to have accelerated to too high a speed. In other words: lookahead of whatever amount does no good when other people have other agenda and their plans change your future and negate your lookahead.
If *everyone* drove to maximize fuel efficiency then it'd be great technology. But if that was high-priority, everyone would be riding mass transportation or bicycles. Technology that presupposes massive changes in human behavior *against their interests* is, at best, cute.
In Jasper fforde's excellent "Tuesday Next" series, one subthread involves extinct animals brought back through cloning technology. Tuesday herself owns a dodo cloned from some early, poor DNA, so it has a bunch of health problems. But the more interesting and uncomfortable part is that the same company that did dods, did Neanderthals. They're sterile and are treated as slave labor, since they're copyrighted and wholly owned by the company that created them.
For the record, I have some lovely pictures of the approach to an aircraft carrier, straight down the deck, taken from the window of a Cessna 152, from within 100 yards of the TFR surrounding Bangor outside Seattle. The pictures aren't fantastic since I was using a P{A,O}S digital camera, but if I'd had my Nikon with the 300x lens, I bet I could've gotten much better shots.
>Some group of people may be offended by feet, porkchops, pentagrams or santa claus but they can't possibly expect other people to share these feelings.
>Do you REALLY think that the US is a "totalitarian" state? What word do you use for places like Cuba, where (unlike the US or Canada) you can get shot for desparately trying to leave.
A woman who is 3 days pregnant is *just* as pregnant as a woman whose belly looks like a beachball. Whether or not the accusation of the US being totalitarian is correct, if the correct word to use for Cuba was totalitarian, and the US fulfilled the same criteria as Cuba, then it would, in fact, be totalitarian.
I studied linguistics for a while, although I'm not sure that is what qualifies me to talk about this: several of my friends work in health services for low-income people, and I live in a neighborhood with a lot of low-income people. To be specific, they're uniformly Hispanic, mostly from Mexico. Many speak reasonable English and are learning more, and many speak very little English and aren't trying to change that. There's a perfectly good reason many don't speak English well: they're not planning on staying. They came up to make enough money to change the lives of their relatives at home and their own lives, and as soon as they've managed that, they're going back to where they came from, back to their homes. The US is, for them, a temporary job and a temporary residence. As such, they consider it a waste to spend the time to learn English well, and particularly to get their children to learn it, since their children won't be here for much longer. The damned, horrible part about it is: it doesn't happen. They don't ever get to go back home because they're making more money here than they do at home, so they stay just a little longer, and just a little longer yet, and suddenly they've been here for 15 years and their kids are in high school and trying to find jobs with broken English and the sad fact that they can't let themselves realize is that they're not ever going home: they ARE home. I've seen this happen a lot. I find it especially painful when the people are living in a hellhole, a broken-down rental house with broken glass in the front yard, where their kids play in ragged torn clothing -- dude, my next-door-neighbor's kids were playing tetherball with a safeway bag full of paper hanging from a dog leash attached to a live aspen tree -- but they have a late-model Cadillac and a brand-new Silverado sitting in the driveway. Why? Because the cars are mobile so they can take them back 'home' but the house is just a temporary thing until they've made enough to go 'home'. It's a situation that just sucks.
As other people have said, there are many ways to measure rotation. Optical encoders with absolute position are cheap and easy to interface. If you have to make it yourself, fire up any CAD program, even the cheapest, and draw a big circle -- 30 cm in diameter -- and subdivide it with 360 or 720 or whatever radial lines, then plot it on a laser printer using overhead transparency film. You can get superb resolution. Then read it with an opto pair from an old mouse -- or two opto pairs in quadrature, for rotation direction. But for $20 or so you can buy an optical encoder that does the same thing: check MSC or Grainger or even Digikey, I believe. There are newer semiconductors that do the same thing: you glue a bar magnet onto the end of the shaft and stick the semiconductor onto a pad nearby and it determines the rotation to 1/1000 of a rotation, as I recall. (I haven't used them, just seen them in EDN and the like.) But for quick&dirty, the overhead-transparency route is really easy. I built one that could show a half-degree variance between two shafts with a cogged belt connecting them (because one pulley wasn't concentric.) It took me 30 minutes to plot, cut out, and glue onto the shafts.
I'm no expert, but my memory and intuition say that any worthwhile encryption scheme will produce material that is statistically indistinguishable from random data, and random data should be, statistically speaking, incompressible. So, encrypted text shouldn't compress at all. Am I wrong? Is it more complicated than that? Just curious.
Two words: college radio. They can play anything they want, and they do. That's about all I listen to anymore, including lots of online streaming college radio stations, and they've turned me onto lots, and lots, and lots of new music, precisely because they're not playing the same 45 songs all the mainstream radiostations are playing.
Cat Power, Arcade Fire, Electralane, Goldfrapp, Gotan Project, Jane Jensen, Leona Naess, Elliott Smith, Robert Miles, Tal Klein, DJ Chebi Sabah, 18th Street Lounge, Sea & Cake, Nobukazu Takihara, Arab Strap, Belle & Sebastian, Air, Mogwai, Sigur Ros, Jason Webley, Bonfire Madigan, Sleater-Kinney -- every one of those I've come across because of college or small internet radio.
Ya know, I've worked in a lot of entry-level jobs with a lot of very poor people. Most of them were missing teeth. I bet you good money they didn't wake up and say "Oh, I'd just love to lose a bunch of my teeth!" They're missing teeth because they didn't go to the dentist, because they couldn't afford to. Poor people have inadequate health care. That's why they don't have teeth. If they went in every time they had a sniffle, they'd still have their teeth. The evidence is *right* there to see. Two jobs ago, I worked with a guy who was a construction worker until he got mercury poisoning and now he can't lift anything because his muscles don't work. Now he lives under a bridge and puts beads on strings when he can find someone who will employ a hostile guy whose hands shake all the time. Would you care to suggest how he can adjust his lifestyle? Another guy who worked at that job lived under the same bridge. He was schizophrenic. Little voices talked to him and told him to go to Phoenix, or to eat gravel. He didn't keep jobs for very long. Again, would you care to suggest a lifestyle change for him, that'd get him decent health care?
>I think that in order to reasonably oppose laws and stances that seem to be bad or counterproductive (the DMCA, etc.) it helps to first understand the underlying feelings that cause people to support it.
If by 'people' you mean large corporations, although I bet that with just a little bit of advertising and effort, those same corporations could convince most people of -- I'm not sure what to call it, the innate value of IP? I think we're both saying, essentially, that the US is trying to create a new type of wealth, called IP, to sustain itself as its old sources of wealth go away. To do that, it has to protect its wealth the same way the British tried to when they banned export of manufacturing technology to the US in the 1700's...
I'm honestly not sure there *is* a solution to the problems we're facing, as a country or as a world. I don't know much, but here are some thoughts: when you own the supply chain, from natural resources through manufacturing, you have a source of income, in the purely physical world of toasters and lightbulbs. With IP, the natural resources are (currently) in school, and the manufacturing system relies on that, so our home-grown resources are dependent on excellent education, which is a pretty questionable premise. But since we have so much money and so little class stratification in comparison to many societies, people come here, with excellent education, allowing us to coast on our past merits -- for a little while.
There's also a question of short vs long-term benefits. Companies that outsource and downsize save money in the short-term, but they're doing so (in the case of outsourcing) by essentially selling their IP -- shipping their manufacturing knowledge somewhere else in return for lower costs. Long-term, this is a problem for the society that does this, but for each company that does this, the net gain is greater, and more quickly realized, than the net loss, creating a race to the bottom that all other companies are obligated to follow. There isn't a flaw to this reasoning, either: companies that don't react quickly, that don't outsource, get outcompeted, so they have to harm their futures to survive today.
I suspect the underlying problem is that as companies increase their market agility, they increase their profitability, but in order to increase agility you have to sacrifice long-term thinking. (And given the amount of churn we see, with mergers and private equity buyouts, it's probably pointless to even consider planning for 10 years down the road unless you're Disney or Microsoft.) So as we stop selling toasters, we start selling what makes us competitive, knowing full well that sometime down the road we'll be facing the same issues other superpowers have once they've run out of natural resources, but hoping for some miracle to happen that'll keep us competitive. In many ways, I think the software explosion was exactly such a miracle, and we might pull it off again with biochemistry/bioengineering over the next thirty years, but it's going to get more difficult with each passing year.
As you said, politicians can't tell people "there are no good solutions" because a politician who says "there IS a good quick easy solution!" will get elected instead, because of lack of critical thinking and analysis skills on the part of the public, so we're right back to the education problems (and to the similarly ugly problem of motivating people to care enough to learn about issues.)
That was a superb essay. I might print that out to hand to people, and I wish I had mod points for you.
One of the problems I see with the American future is that two of those products -- music and movies -- are to a large extent dependent on the health of the country in general. If/when things start to turn really sour and we don't have as much money as a country, we're not the glamour spot of the world, then our culture will no longer be a defining one and our movies and music will be relevant only to us. I think the long-term viability of entertainment is based on the long-term viability of the culture. So that reduces us to exporting natural resources -- of which we still have lots -- or reacquiring manufacturing capabilities once our economy has slowed to the point where we can do that at the same price as third-world nations.
Re:This is (now) a famous number-theory integer!
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To be etymologically more complete, 'geek' used to refer to a circus performer who tore off and ate the heads of chickens (hence the title of Katherine Dunn's brilliant book "Geek Love") although it originally just meant 'fool' in Shakespeare's time.
In contrast, 'nerd' was apparently invented by Dr. Seuss in about 1950, and applied to a fuzzy animal (probably wearing a hat.)
So while it's possible that there have been brief moments where they've been near-synonymous, one has a five-hundred-year history that's pretty varied, while the other is brand-new and probably just cozied up with its much older cousin.
Re:I'm continually amazed at
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For what it's worth, you can do the same with most insects. When I was a twisted, biologically-inclined child, I froze/thawed grasshoppers, sometimes upwards of 20x in a row, and they were still viable. A bit stupid and not jumping right, but still moving and eating. Weirdly, it was my experience that they did better if they were thawed slowly (more than 30 minutes) than quickly, while many other people doing cryrogenics use flash-freezing. I suspect very slow freezing allows the insect to produce materials like glycols that prevent long, damaging ice crystals from forming, while fairly quick freezing does make long ice crystals, and flash-freezing is too quick for long ice crystals to form. Many fish can also freeze solid and survive. I've read about people chipping thousands-of-years-old fish and frogs out of polar ice and reviving them.
Ditto that. I haven't bought a computer since my Amiga 2000: I've built them all. But in the last couple of years, hardware prices have dropped so much and installed bundles have improved so much (and my time and aweareness of hardware-compatibility issues have dropped enough) that I'm looking to buy a system. I was going to get a Mac mini, but instead I think I'll probably try this.
I knew/briefly worked with a guy who'd gone into a coma from mercury poisoning. When they talk about mad-as-a-hatter they're not joking. His house was contaminated in the 1920's, he was a construction worker so started working on stuff that hadn't been touched since then, and after two months of working on the house he dropped unconscious while at work (after complaining of fatigue and other things.) Two years later, after the best treatment medicine had to offer, he was still a very, very strange individual, with serious emotional problems, living under a bridge and doing part-time work when he could find it. I can't imagine what people who worked with mercury for their whole lives were like, emotionally and personality-wise.
I dearly hope some of her subsequent students start doing freewriting that looks like: "I'm boring. I don't say anything dangerous. I just write boring safe stuff. This is safe. So is this. Here's another safe sentence. I sure hope I don't get kicked out of school for writing this. Oh, look, another safe sentence."
Okay, so I was a misfit in school, but I can imagine a dozen students doing four pages each of this on a sufficiently regular and annoying basis to qualify as disruptive conduct. How cool would that be? especially inasmuch as it would be saying something very important, without ever saying anything. Here's to hoping other students there are creative.
A lot of historians, particularly historians of science, have made the claim that about the only way anything ever advances is by coming up with a new idea, publicizing it, and then waiting for all the experts in the field to die off, at which point the new idea, if still viable, is accepted. They claim that it's rare experts change their minds. Instead, the experts change. So: yeah, what you said, only replace "Sometimes" with "Usually".
Slashdot Mirror
>Name one other religion that refuses to open its documents so someone can look at them WITHOUT you having to pay to see them.
How about the Mormons? Note that I *like* the Mormon faith in many ways, and don't intend this as a criticism of the faith, but the Church has spent a lot of money buying up documents about early Mormon history so that they disappear and stop being inconvenient.
I worked in big manufacturing for a while. You really want those buttons to be as quick to hit as possible. We had a dozen excimer lasers and when something went wrong, wrong generally meant one was leaking fluorine gas. When that alarm went off, you didn't inhale: you ran for the door and hoped the air you had in your lungs would last until you got outside. Not so much time for twist-and-pull. What we *did* have was EPO buttons that were recessed, with a sort of cuff around them, so that nothing could fall and trigger them, technicians wouldn't press them by mistake while leaning over the machine to work on optics replacement, stuff like that. However, if you were sitting on top of the machine working on an optics tower, say, and your legs were hanging down the side of the machine, and you were to try to scootch around to get to the upper turning mirror by waving your legs about, your heel was certainly sufficient to fit in the collar around the EPO and push it... damn.
I do the same thing you do, and that's the reasonable way to drive, I think. As best I know, that's the most efficient way: once you see the light turn red, the best you can possibly do is stop using gas right then. My original assertion is that their claims for their driving setup, and its look-ahead features, don't take into account other cars and their behavior, which I think is the major obstacle we're facing when we're driving. Their system works very well for a car by itself on an empty road, but they can't rely on optimized coasting strategies or optimized acceleration strategies because the way other drivers drive will eliminate most of those gains.
With all that said, from the numbers I've seen, a small car driving 35 mph is producing something like 15 horsepower or less, which is burning less than a gallon an hour. I should be able to be more precise: if we assume the car has a brake specific fuel consumption of 0.45 from here, that means we'd be burning 15*.45 = 7 pounds of fuel an hour -- which is just over a gallon. (I didn't realize it was that much.) In any case, we're talking the other dude spending maybe an extra twenty seconds burning gas, at a gallon an hour, for a fuel savings for you of, what, 1/180 of a gallon? I grant you that builds up over time, but 0.5% is a hard way to make a profit... That first link claimed that more than 50% of your gas was used in acceleration. That might be true for fairly rural driving, but in city driving I bet it's more like 65%, and for the idiots who stomp the gas to the floor at every stoplight, which apparently a lot of automatic-transmission drivers do (I make this claim by sometimes matching the acceleration of the car beside me, and my not-too-slow car requiring near-full-out gas and hard shifting to stay with sedans driven by not-trying-to-race people) it's probably higher yet.
The amount of gas used is highly dependent on how fast you accelerate, and linearly dependent on how long you go at that speed. My point was that if you do burn-and-coast, you have no cruise at all, and if you decrease your acceleration during the burn phase so that you get to a top speed that'll give you exactly enough kinetic energy to get to your next stop, then your overall efficiency is based purely on what that top speed is, because your acceleration will determine that top speed. Coasting doesn't lose energy, it just reflects wasted energy during the burn phase: once it's been wasted, it remains wasted (although some can be reclaimed through regen brakes.)
I've always been curious about the Prius friction brakes. The efficiency and efficacy of dynamic braking looks to me like it'd drop off linearly as speed dropped. Do the friction brakes run the whole time, or do they cut in at some point, or do they just steadily dissipate increasing amounts of energy?
Yes, several experiments with living contents survived the Columbia crash, including several simple cans full of nematode worms that survived 2300G impacts. Consider that the most likely sterilizing agent will be heat, and the fragments will, as you say, be going much faster than Columbia was: the heat on the leading edge extremely high (vaporizing) but the heat in crevices much lower because of the thermal conductivity of the material. If it's going fast and makes it to ground without burning up, they're more likely to survive than when it's on an initially surviveable glide path.
For the record, it's (near) sterile when it's still in the bladder but there are bacteria, protozoans, or whatever the host animal has living around the urethra and quite likely somewhat within it, that'll contaminate the urine as it leaves the body, and some of them will survive the high urea concentration and begin multiplying in the urine after a while. Likewise, there are scads of bacteria on the body, particularly in That Area, and physical contact with That Area is going to transfer stuff to your hands.
But it's all a distraction anyway: the stuff living under your fingernails is vibrant and very nearly impossible to wipe out, even with serious medical-quality washing. A three-minute multiple-pass wash, that doctors do between seeing patients, kills about 80% of the viable bacteria living in the under-fingernail environment (source: personal research done while getting my microbiology degree, also discussed in Atul Gawande's book "Better" with similar numbers) so if they weren't using gloves, there's plenty of stuff getting through.
Interestingly, apparently despite significant bacterial presence in the bladder the urine remains sterile until the bacterial population rises to acute levels. The bacteria apparently cling to the walls of the bladder and invade the epithelial cells, and probably create favorable microclimates via metabolism, much like H. pylori in the stomach.
1. Put this tech on hybrids, instead of attacking them for only being as good as this tech.
2. Once you're at speed, all braking is loss (unless you have regenerative braking.) So coasting slooooooooooowly to a stop wastes no more energy than coasting right up to the stop and then stopping suddenly. It's harder on your brakes, but it doesn't waste your gasoline. I haven't seen any discussion of this, but I assume that with regenerative braking, you recover more energy from a rapid stop than a slow one since less energy is lost in rolling friction.
Now, the presumption in #2 is that you're not staying on the gas once you've seen that you have to stop for something ahead. Which also means that whenever you see you have to stop, you take your foot off the gas, in which case you'll always be coasting slooooooooowly to a stop.
So let's address the *actual* problems with traffic flow. If you're sitting at a stoplight and you start off, seeing that the next stoplight is red, to minimize your fuel usage you do lookahead driving and accelerate very slowly to the speed that will allow you to coast and stop at the next stoplight. By so doing, you piss off all the other people in traffic behind you, and since people don't like to do that, they don't accelerate that way. Also, when you're sloooooooooowly coasting to a stop, based on your energy management assumptions, a half-dozen cars who took off fast and are now in the other lane will pull into your lane, thus pushing your stop point well forwards and causing you to have accelerated to too high a speed. In other words: lookahead of whatever amount does no good when other people have other agenda and their plans change your future and negate your lookahead.
If *everyone* drove to maximize fuel efficiency then it'd be great technology. But if that was high-priority, everyone would be riding mass transportation or bicycles. Technology that presupposes massive changes in human behavior *against their interests* is, at best, cute.
In Jasper fforde's excellent "Tuesday Next" series, one subthread involves extinct animals brought back through cloning technology. Tuesday herself owns a dodo cloned from some early, poor DNA, so it has a bunch of health problems. But the more interesting and uncomfortable part is that the same company that did dods, did Neanderthals. They're sterile and are treated as slave labor, since they're copyrighted and wholly owned by the company that created them.
For the record, I have some lovely pictures of the approach to an aircraft carrier, straight down the deck, taken from the window of a Cessna 152, from within 100 yards of the TFR surrounding Bangor outside Seattle. The pictures aren't fantastic since I was using a P{A,O}S digital camera, but if I'd had my Nikon with the 300x lens, I bet I could've gotten much better shots.
>Some group of people may be offended by feet, porkchops, pentagrams or santa claus but they can't possibly expect other people to share these feelings.
or, say, a woman's exposed breast on television?
>Do you REALLY think that the US is a "totalitarian" state? What word do you use for places like Cuba, where (unlike the US or Canada) you can get shot for desparately trying to leave.
A woman who is 3 days pregnant is *just* as pregnant as a woman whose belly looks like a beachball. Whether or not the accusation of the US being totalitarian is correct, if the correct word to use for Cuba was totalitarian, and the US fulfilled the same criteria as Cuba, then it would, in fact, be totalitarian.
I studied linguistics for a while, although I'm not sure that is what qualifies me to talk about this: several of my friends work in health services for low-income people, and I live in a neighborhood with a lot of low-income people. To be specific, they're uniformly Hispanic, mostly from Mexico. Many speak reasonable English and are learning more, and many speak very little English and aren't trying to change that. There's a perfectly good reason many don't speak English well: they're not planning on staying. They came up to make enough money to change the lives of their relatives at home and their own lives, and as soon as they've managed that, they're going back to where they came from, back to their homes. The US is, for them, a temporary job and a temporary residence. As such, they consider it a waste to spend the time to learn English well, and particularly to get their children to learn it, since their children won't be here for much longer.
The damned, horrible part about it is: it doesn't happen. They don't ever get to go back home because they're making more money here than they do at home, so they stay just a little longer, and just a little longer yet, and suddenly they've been here for 15 years and their kids are in high school and trying to find jobs with broken English and the sad fact that they can't let themselves realize is that they're not ever going home: they ARE home. I've seen this happen a lot. I find it especially painful when the people are living in a hellhole, a broken-down rental house with broken glass in the front yard, where their kids play in ragged torn clothing -- dude, my next-door-neighbor's kids were playing tetherball with a safeway bag full of paper hanging from a dog leash attached to a live aspen tree -- but they have a late-model Cadillac and a brand-new Silverado sitting in the driveway. Why? Because the cars are mobile so they can take them back 'home' but the house is just a temporary thing until they've made enough to go 'home'.
It's a situation that just sucks.
As other people have said, there are many ways to measure rotation. Optical encoders with absolute position are cheap and easy to interface. If you have to make it yourself, fire up any CAD program, even the cheapest, and draw a big circle -- 30 cm in diameter -- and subdivide it with 360 or 720 or whatever radial lines, then plot it on a laser printer using overhead transparency film. You can get superb resolution. Then read it with an opto pair from an old mouse -- or two opto pairs in quadrature, for rotation direction. But for $20 or so you can buy an optical encoder that does the same thing: check MSC or Grainger or even Digikey, I believe. There are newer semiconductors that do the same thing: you glue a bar magnet onto the end of the shaft and stick the semiconductor onto a pad nearby and it determines the rotation to 1/1000 of a rotation, as I recall. (I haven't used them, just seen them in EDN and the like.) But for quick&dirty, the overhead-transparency route is really easy. I built one that could show a half-degree variance between two shafts with a cogged belt connecting them (because one pulley wasn't concentric.) It took me 30 minutes to plot, cut out, and glue onto the shafts.
>Encrypted text rarely compresses well,
I'm no expert, but my memory and intuition say that any worthwhile encryption scheme will produce material that is statistically indistinguishable from random data, and random data should be, statistically speaking, incompressible. So, encrypted text shouldn't compress at all. Am I wrong? Is it more complicated than that? Just curious.
That was my thought, too: "and Pluto has frozen solid ice, whereas Earth has gaseous, vaporous air!"
Two words: college radio. They can play anything they want, and they do. That's about all I listen to anymore, including lots of online streaming college radio stations, and they've turned me onto lots, and lots, and lots of new music, precisely because they're not playing the same 45 songs all the mainstream radiostations are playing.
Cat Power, Arcade Fire, Electralane, Goldfrapp, Gotan Project, Jane Jensen, Leona Naess, Elliott Smith, Robert Miles, Tal Klein, DJ Chebi Sabah, 18th Street Lounge, Sea & Cake, Nobukazu Takihara, Arab Strap, Belle & Sebastian, Air, Mogwai, Sigur Ros, Jason Webley, Bonfire Madigan, Sleater-Kinney -- every one of those I've come across because of college or small internet radio.
Ya know, I've worked in a lot of entry-level jobs with a lot of very poor people. Most of them were missing teeth. I bet you good money they didn't wake up and say "Oh, I'd just love to lose a bunch of my teeth!" They're missing teeth because they didn't go to the dentist, because they couldn't afford to. Poor people have inadequate health care. That's why they don't have teeth. If they went in every time they had a sniffle, they'd still have their teeth. The evidence is *right* there to see. Two jobs ago, I worked with a guy who was a construction worker until he got mercury poisoning and now he can't lift anything because his muscles don't work. Now he lives under a bridge and puts beads on strings when he can find someone who will employ a hostile guy whose hands shake all the time. Would you care to suggest how he can adjust his lifestyle? Another guy who worked at that job lived under the same bridge. He was schizophrenic. Little voices talked to him and told him to go to Phoenix, or to eat gravel. He didn't keep jobs for very long. Again, would you care to suggest a lifestyle change for him, that'd get him decent health care?
>I think that in order to reasonably oppose laws and stances that seem to be bad or counterproductive (the DMCA, etc.) it helps to first understand the underlying feelings that cause people to support it.
If by 'people' you mean large corporations, although I bet that with just a little bit of advertising and effort, those same corporations could convince most people of -- I'm not sure what to call it, the innate value of IP? I think we're both saying, essentially, that the US is trying to create a new type of wealth, called IP, to sustain itself as its old sources of wealth go away. To do that, it has to protect its wealth the same way the British tried to when they banned export of manufacturing technology to the US in the 1700's...
I'm honestly not sure there *is* a solution to the problems we're facing, as a country or as a world. I don't know much, but here are some thoughts: when you own the supply chain, from natural resources through manufacturing, you have a source of income, in the purely physical world of toasters and lightbulbs. With IP, the natural resources are (currently) in school, and the manufacturing system relies on that, so our home-grown resources are dependent on excellent education, which is a pretty questionable premise. But since we have so much money and so little class stratification in comparison to many societies, people come here, with excellent education, allowing us to coast on our past merits -- for a little while.
There's also a question of short vs long-term benefits. Companies that outsource and downsize save money in the short-term, but they're doing so (in the case of outsourcing) by essentially selling their IP -- shipping their manufacturing knowledge somewhere else in return for lower costs. Long-term, this is a problem for the society that does this, but for each company that does this, the net gain is greater, and more quickly realized, than the net loss, creating a race to the bottom that all other companies are obligated to follow. There isn't a flaw to this reasoning, either: companies that don't react quickly, that don't outsource, get outcompeted, so they have to harm their futures to survive today.
I suspect the underlying problem is that as companies increase their market agility, they increase their profitability, but in order to increase agility you have to sacrifice long-term thinking. (And given the amount of churn we see, with mergers and private equity buyouts, it's probably pointless to even consider planning for 10 years down the road unless you're Disney or Microsoft.) So as we stop selling toasters, we start selling what makes us competitive, knowing full well that sometime down the road we'll be facing the same issues other superpowers have once they've run out of natural resources, but hoping for some miracle to happen that'll keep us competitive. In many ways, I think the software explosion was exactly such a miracle, and we might pull it off again with biochemistry/bioengineering over the next thirty years, but it's going to get more difficult with each passing year.
As you said, politicians can't tell people "there are no good solutions" because a politician who says "there IS a good quick easy solution!" will get elected instead, because of lack of critical thinking and analysis skills on the part of the public, so we're right back to the education problems (and to the similarly ugly problem of motivating people to care enough to learn about issues.)
That was a superb essay. I might print that out to hand to people, and I wish I had mod points for you.
One of the problems I see with the American future is that two of those products -- music and movies -- are to a large extent dependent on the health of the country in general. If/when things start to turn really sour and we don't have as much money as a country, we're not the glamour spot of the world, then our culture will no longer be a defining one and our movies and music will be relevant only to us. I think the long-term viability of entertainment is based on the long-term viability of the culture. So that reduces us to exporting natural resources -- of which we still have lots -- or reacquiring manufacturing capabilities once our economy has slowed to the point where we can do that at the same price as third-world nations.
To be etymologically more complete, 'geek' used to refer to a circus performer who tore off and ate the heads of chickens (hence the title of Katherine Dunn's brilliant book "Geek Love") although it originally just meant 'fool' in Shakespeare's time.
In contrast, 'nerd' was apparently invented by Dr. Seuss in about 1950, and applied to a fuzzy animal (probably wearing a hat.)
So while it's possible that there have been brief moments where they've been near-synonymous, one has a five-hundred-year history that's pretty varied, while the other is brand-new and probably just cozied up with its much older cousin.
For what it's worth, you can do the same with most insects. When I was a twisted, biologically-inclined child, I froze/thawed grasshoppers, sometimes upwards of 20x in a row, and they were still viable. A bit stupid and not jumping right, but still moving and eating. Weirdly, it was my experience that they did better if they were thawed slowly (more than 30 minutes) than quickly, while many other people doing cryrogenics use flash-freezing. I suspect very slow freezing allows the insect to produce materials like glycols that prevent long, damaging ice crystals from forming, while fairly quick freezing does make long ice crystals, and flash-freezing is too quick for long ice crystals to form.
Many fish can also freeze solid and survive. I've read about people chipping thousands-of-years-old fish and frogs out of polar ice and reviving them.
Ditto that. I haven't bought a computer since my Amiga 2000: I've built them all. But in the last couple of years, hardware prices have dropped so much and installed bundles have improved so much (and my time and aweareness of hardware-compatibility issues have dropped enough) that I'm looking to buy a system. I was going to get a Mac mini, but instead I think I'll probably try this.
I knew/briefly worked with a guy who'd gone into a coma from mercury poisoning. When they talk about mad-as-a-hatter they're not joking. His house was contaminated in the 1920's, he was a construction worker so started working on stuff that hadn't been touched since then, and after two months of working on the house he dropped unconscious while at work (after complaining of fatigue and other things.) Two years later, after the best treatment medicine had to offer, he was still a very, very strange individual, with serious emotional problems, living under a bridge and doing part-time work when he could find it. I can't imagine what people who worked with mercury for their whole lives were like, emotionally and personality-wise.
I dearly hope some of her subsequent students start doing freewriting that looks like:
"I'm boring. I don't say anything dangerous. I just write boring safe stuff. This is safe. So is this. Here's another safe sentence. I sure hope I don't get kicked out of school for writing this. Oh, look, another safe sentence."
Okay, so I was a misfit in school, but I can imagine a dozen students doing four pages each of this on a sufficiently regular and annoying basis to qualify as disruptive conduct. How cool would that be? especially inasmuch as it would be saying something very important, without ever saying anything. Here's to hoping other students there are creative.
A lot of historians, particularly historians of science, have made the claim that about the only way anything ever advances is by coming up with a new idea, publicizing it, and then waiting for all the experts in the field to die off, at which point the new idea, if still viable, is accepted. They claim that it's rare experts change their minds. Instead, the experts change. So: yeah, what you said, only replace "Sometimes" with "Usually".