Yeah, kind of like how colleges in the '80's pushed Macs, which is why nobody ever uses anything else...
Sure, business majors probably use TI's. As I said elsewhere in this thread, I work in semiconductor design, and the only TI's where I work are the ones sitting around in the lab gathering dust. All the design and apps engineers have HP calculators from the '80's, and use them every day. However, our receptionist uses a TI.
I work at National Semiconductor. As far as I've seen, every engineer who uses a calculator at our design center has either an 11C or a 15C. I've had mine since 1984. There are a few TI's sitting around in the labs gathering dust, that are used for emergency addition if someone's HP managed to get left at the desk, but the TI's are shunned, generally.
I can run my 15C by touch, I've used it for so long. And, the weirdest/best thing of all is that, as I said, I've had this since 1984; it took me through ten years or thereabouts of college and several chemistry and engineering jobs since then, and in that time I've gone through *two* sets of batteries; I'm now on my third. I don't quite get a decade out of a set, but pretty close.
Oh, I agree entirely. It was just the mention of Colorado passes that got me going. When I'm driving in town, if I'm a little careful, I only have to step on the brakes about once every third stoplight, because with careful energy control and shifting, I can coast up to a stop behind cars. It'd sure be nice to have regen, though.
I like your idea but in the aforementioned Colorado Mountain Passes, that I drive every weekend, there are a number of places where I have to brake: the car coasts to well over 120 km/hour if I don't, and that's not so great when it's a narrow two-lane road with sand and dirt on the road surface, no guard rail, and a 30 meter vertical drop into a rushing stream... Check out this pic -- the road's obvious in the left-hand side, but you can also see a fragment in the right, and another in the upper right. Those represent about 2500 meters vertical over about 6 km of road. This is the shallower side of the pass. There's one charming section on the other side where the road is only one lane wide -- cars basically have to take turns unless they're small -- with a breathtaking dropoff for the unwary. Here's a view of how I usually see it -- although that's not my pic, nor me on the bike, unfortunately. Again, those dropoffs are pretty mild compared to the vertical exposure on the lower sections.
Yeah, I installed it in my car, programmed to 'shuffle', and some day it'll go in a kitplane. It's entirely nonportable. But in 1997, when (I think) I put it together, there was nothing like it.
I have an ipod, that my company *gave* me. My gf has a Zen Nomad 30g. Her sister has a Zen mini (dunno the model). My brother has a Zen Nomad 30g. My mom has a Zen Nomad 30g. Oh, and besides the ipod, I also have a PJRC that currently has a 20 gig drive, because it gets unhappy with the 160 gig that I strapped on there, and the 80 I had on there died recently. That one gets by far the most comments. ("That's a WHAT?" "A ten year old MP3 player." "They *had* those back then?" "Yeah, they looked like this.")
As you say, the Denon has a lot more functionality, and the Marantz has a button for everything. The problem is obvious: as the functionality increases, the number of buttons increases. Consider a computer: we don't have a specific button for 'launch excel, launch graph wizard, choose scatter chart'. We have to go through menus. That's a *good* thing.
Aviation GPS design is a great example. They're really complex machines, with a zillion options, and you can spend an hour programming them and getting everything set up. But when you're in the air and something goes hideously awry with your airplane, most of them have a single emergency button and you hit that and it shows you where the nearest airport is, direction and distance. So you have the best of both worlds: enormous hidden functionality, that relies on your self-education to use, and a very few specific-use buttons for time-critical applications. That's Good Design. Intermediate Design is the Denon, where everything's hidden in a menu, and Crappy Design is the computer with the 1200 key keyboard, with one key for 'launch excel, launch graph wizard, choose scatter chart' and the like. The Marantz skates because it doesn't have enough functionality to make complete specificity overwhelming, but that's not an extensible design.
I fight with this a lot, with test&measurement equipment. There are network analyzers and parametric analyzers from the '80's that are just nightmares to use because of the sheer number of buttons they have. There are modern digital oscilloscopes that have about five buttons total and you spend all your time digging around in menus trying to find the option you want. (The Keithley 2600 sourcemeter is a prime example of this: I know there's a fabulous machine hidden in there somewhere...) Then there are a very few machines, not consistently from any one vendor (although Tektronics does a pretty good job) that anticipate what keys you *need* and what functions can be hidden in menus behind multiuse/softkeys. Those are the machines everyone uses, leaving, say, the Yokogawa scope and the HP network analyzers sitting unused and lonely on the benches.
You'd appreciate this. My father was an electrical engineer. When I was about seven, he thought it'd be a good time to teach me about electricity, so the way he did it was: he gave me a toy, an old Ford spark coil with a battery. It generated 40kV or so, but at nanoamp ranges. Still, it stung like *hell*, and of course I shocked myself constantly, because it was really a cool toy: you push the button and a 2 cm spark jumps through the air. You line up a bunch of little wires with a gap between each one and push the button and little blue sparks jump from each to the next. Or to you. So I've had a raft of not-entirely-intentional high-voltage experience.
My gf's an ophthalmic tech and she's indicated she doesn't think floaters are very much associated with arcs or photon-associated damage. (I used to be a laser tech and had quite a few exposures there, too.) She said it has more to do with how your eye circulates and clears materials in the bag of clearish gel that fills eyes.
My assumption is that titanium oxide, in almost any form, is going to be a simply superb insulator. I was figuring they used the TiO2 as some sort of substrate or support structure, but the article is very nearly actual-information-free, so it's hard to tell.
It would be a *lot* more convenient if they generated an electron gradient, but much harder to design in the first place. Lazy engineers...
Weird article. Lessee. >Dr Campbell said that unlike silicone-based solar cells, the dye- based cells are still able to operate in low-light conditions
I'm unfamiliar with these silicone-based solar cells: are those the ones you tape on Pam Anderson's breasts?
Titanium/titanium dioxide? All the dyes they talk about are organic: porphyrins are heterocyclic aromatics that complex a metal ion in their centers. Not titanium dioxide, the compound: a metallic ion all by itself. Probably iron or magnesium. Ditto hemoglobin.
With those complaints aside, one of the neat things about using naturally produced chromophores is that, well, they're naturally produced, so we could get them in enormous quantities. Similarly, they can be tuned, so you could have ones that absorb different wavelengths of light, with high efficiency, stacked, to extract more energy out of the sunlight than a single-bandgap cell like most photovoltaics.
But essentially they're trying to replicate the behavior of plants, and rather than messing about with dyes in solution, it seems way more productive (although, clearly, harder) to try and get plant cells to do this for us: harness the ion gradients in their chloroplasts, parasitize their electric potential. Most of the machinery is already there. We just need to get the voltage potential outside the cell.
There are people who stop setting up their systems? Really? That's cool. I never even get the case put back on mine, much less stop adjusting and installing and tweaking. (That's a big benefit of a laptop: it's not always sitting around with the sides off and wires streaming out to nearby electronics, coz I can't *do* that with a laptop. I'm definitely the computer equivalent of the guy in high school who never had the hood on his car. He had the coolest car... but he was also the only person who *needed* the fire extinguisher under the passenger's seat.)
We don't currently know how to print chunks of aluminum that have the strength of cold-forged aluminum. Ten years ago we didn't know how geckos stick to walls. Now we're beginning to make things that imitate that functionality.
When engineers start using the capability of 3-d printing, they'll come up with new techniques, but the underlying idea, of being able to make things that can't *be* machined, will be sufficiently seductive that I don't think there'll be any point to the way we currently assemble things. (For the record, I don't actually think we'll be printing bearings any time soon because there are way too many materials problems, but instead of cold-forging piston conn rods, why not print them out of aluminum reinforced with printed strands of boron or silicon carbide whiskers? You should be able to get higher yield strength from that than from cold-forged.)
The point being: if an engineer designs an object, that's going to be run on 3-d fab -- which, I'd argue, is inevitable -- the value is in the information of the design, *not* the object itself, because other 3-d fabs can duplicate it. So Mrs. Mable makes her own axle bolts from the kit given to her by her nephew, who downloaded the plans from the Internet, where a disgruntled engineer posted them after losing his job.
By the way, it's not like this isn't a problem right now. I work with kitplanes. People *often* use Ace Hardware bolts to hold the wings on. (and then die.) There are lots of Mrs. Mables out there, and they suffer awful fates, and that's not ever going to change.
Yes-and-no. Replicating a Ferrari GTO is still going to be very expensive using a 3-d printer (it's not even possible right now, and will probably always be very expensive) but the really essential thing is: 3-d printers can make things *differently*. You don't need to be able to design a part that can be cut on a four-axis mill. You don't need to sand-cast an engine block with all the weird water passages. You just print it with all those things already in place. You can put tapped holes in blind locations, should you want to. Instead of an engine having 20,000 parts it might have 2000 -- just imagine, for instance, printing a crankshaft, a big fat one that has almost no bending under torque, along with the shell bearings, the piston conn rods, the maincap bearings, all in one go -- no conn rod bolts, no cap bolts, nothing. Yeah, so you can't replace conn rods or bearings when they wear, but if you can just print a new engine, why bother trying? What I'm trying to say here is that if we were still blacksmithing and someone built a three-axis CNC, this is the equivalent of saying "but they won't be able to mill something that looks like my wrought-iron-and-wood wagon wheel!"
I don't think ice build-up would be a problem because this is so high any moisture's going to be solidly frozen already. Icing is a big problem when you're right at freezing so liquid or semiliquid water hits and freezes. When it's already solid, it usually just bounces. here's a page with some discussion -- if you scroll down a bit there's a graph of dewpoint/temp/icing that indicates that under -15C you won't see any icing. When I got my pilot's license, what they taught was that the problem is entirely with supercooled liquid water, and "Generally, cloud ice and snow do not adhere to the airframe, and graupel and small hail may actually help to remove accreted ice."
To sum up as briefly as possible: freedom is a long-term, wide-spread benefit, while security is seen as a short-term, personal benefit. If an individual stands a (very very very slim) chance of being killed by a terrorist, that loss is far greater than any possible loss that could come from curtailed freedom. As such, the person's rational choice is to sacrifice freedom for security. It's like the old public grazing grounds: everyone has a horse, and if one person gets a second horse, everyone else loses very little but that person gains a lot, so that person has strong incentive to get a second horse. In this case it's safety.
The problem is: media tell us that there are all these DANGEROUS THINGS, and that builds a society where everyone is more worried about safety than freedom. We overestimate the potential danger of riots, terrorism, and other very unusual things, while underestimating the danger of increasing government intrusion into our lives.
The next problem is: the media only tells us what we want to read, for the most part. This is a problem that's feeding on primal, fundamental human fears. As population pressure rises, people get increasingly scared and protective of what they have, and are increasingly willing to trade the freedom they don't think they're using, for security they think they'll gain.
The sad part is: we're not getting measurably more secure, while we are getting measurably less free.
You're correct about diversity. Malcolm Gladwell wrote a New Yorker article about racial diversity, or more specifically, about why so many athletes in some sports are of African descent. A geneticist studying this is quoted: "I would say, without a doubt, that in almost any single African population-a tribe or however you want to define it-there is more genetic variation than in all the rest of the world put together..." The conclusion is that since there's more diversity, there are more people at the high -- and low -- extremes of fitness in African-derived populations. It's an interesting article. In some other stuff I've read, that I can't find, they talk about how expectations form success (he talks a little about this) and give an example of how in the early 1900's the majority of basketball players were small Jews, because at the time it was believed that they had faster reflexes so could outmaneuver larger/slower players. The more racism changes, the more it stays the same...
Those rules would really, really slow me down, especially the never-cut-one-wire: if it's romex, and live, it's a pain to cut one wire at a time and you're as likely to meet disaster trying to strip the insulation off the middle of a wire run than just cutting it. My rules? Never use uninsulated tools. Never use both hands. Never stand on or touch anything grounded while working.
Luckily I live in a very dry environment, so my skin surface resistance is in excess of 5M. I've brushed live 220 lines and it wasn't fun, but it wasn't a problem. (I'd turned the old breaker off, but it was internally screwed so it wasn't actually off. Since I'm a nervous person I pulled one lead at a time and capped them -- great, until while trying to pull the wiring out of a conduit, it sprang, in apparent violation of physics, discarding the tightly-screwed-on wirecaps. In contrast, touching live 110 results in just a light buzzing feeling. As my brother said, when we were working on his house, "hey, touch this: the wire feels like it's vibrating." Yeah, that's coz it's live. "oh. Huh. Must be dry today." Yep.)
>Please note, US lawmakers, that quite a lot of the world and the Net *is* outside the US, BTW.
A: what's to stop them trying, anyway? What do they have to lose? Nothing. What do they have to gain? Publicity for trying to Make The Net Safe For Children.
B: what's to stop the US government from leaning very heavily on foreign countries to do things the way the US wants them done?
I agree with you, but there are a whole lot of people in the US who think that the US can solve any problem with suitable application of diplomatic force, and there's increasing evidence that they're correct.
Wrap cellphone securely in several layers of aluminum foil. Interference problems solved!
More seriously, it'd be neat if airplanes had cells associated with them, so each airplane could grab all the phone requests and relay them to ground via some no-doubt proprietary, expensive, costs-forwarded-to-customer radio signal that doesn't jam cell towers across entire states.
Presumably, we'd have sensors that detect fields, and we'd then write software to turn that info into some sort of meaningful display, so we could choose whatever we wanted. My initial thought was that field intensity would make sense to map as color, but probably field intensity -> saturation would be more reasonable. You could map color to electric potential, to indicate the direction of flow. However, I think it might be as informational to map color to magnitude with ground being somewhere in the green range, so dark red would be strongly positive and purple strongly negative. The problem rapidly becomes how to represent multidimensional information in a reasonable way -- an interface design problem.
That'd be awesome. I'd like one of those. What I've ended up doing is: my dad was an electrical engineer, and one of the instruments he designed was an extremely sensitive, precision amplifier. If I hook the output of it to a speaker, I can take the input and wave it near a wall and *hear* the buzz of the live wires. But I think it'd be -- or could be -- a visually spectacular sight to be able to perceive EM fields, because I imagine them being like auroras or the colors you see in plasma etch chambers. It'd make for a whole different form of art.
You say that to be funny, and it is, but it's also insightful. One of the things about evolution is that it can only work with what it has, which is why our backs hurt all the time. Evolution can't just suddenly stick a good spine/leg support/locomotion system in, but works with what already exists, intended for quadrupeds. (This is, in essence, the area that the Irreducible Complexity crowd are attacking.) But, look at x86 and its dominance over itanium. Itanium is a *good* design, but x86 is outcompeting the hell out of it because with a kludge here and a workaround there, it could be iteratively fixed up to outperform itanium. x86 has evolved to be the top dog despite going up against intelligent design of the itanium, showing that the criteria for success aren't always what we think they are.
for those of us who spend a lot of time rewiring our houses or playing with high-voltage and high-current devices. Coz boy howdy is it exciting when you clip a line for which you think you've turned off the breaker, and kerblammo. Takes a good-sized chunk out of wireclippers before the correct breaker trips.
I tried tagging the story/dev/brain but the tagging system doesn't like punctuation, apparently.
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Yeah, kind of like how colleges in the '80's pushed Macs, which is why nobody ever uses anything else...
Sure, business majors probably use TI's. As I said elsewhere in this thread, I work in semiconductor design, and the only TI's where I work are the ones sitting around in the lab gathering dust. All the design and apps engineers have HP calculators from the '80's, and use them every day. However, our receptionist uses a TI.
I work at National Semiconductor. As far as I've seen, every engineer who uses a calculator at our design center has either an 11C or a 15C. I've had mine since 1984. There are a few TI's sitting around in the labs gathering dust, that are used for emergency addition if someone's HP managed to get left at the desk, but the TI's are shunned, generally.
I can run my 15C by touch, I've used it for so long. And, the weirdest/best thing of all is that, as I said, I've had this since 1984; it took me through ten years or thereabouts of college and several chemistry and engineering jobs since then, and in that time I've gone through *two* sets of batteries; I'm now on my third. I don't quite get a decade out of a set, but pretty close.
Oh, I agree entirely. It was just the mention of Colorado passes that got me going. When I'm driving in town, if I'm a little careful, I only have to step on the brakes about once every third stoplight, because with careful energy control and shifting, I can coast up to a stop behind cars. It'd sure be nice to have regen, though.
I like your idea but in the aforementioned Colorado Mountain Passes, that I drive every weekend, there are a number of places where I have to brake: the car coasts to well over 120 km/hour if I don't, and that's not so great when it's a narrow two-lane road with sand and dirt on the road surface, no guard rail, and a 30 meter vertical drop into a rushing stream...
Check out this pic -- the road's obvious in the left-hand side, but you can also see a fragment in the right, and another in the upper right. Those represent about 2500 meters vertical over about 6 km of road. This is the shallower side of the pass. There's one charming section on the other side where the road is only one lane wide -- cars basically have to take turns unless they're small -- with a breathtaking dropoff for the unwary. Here's a view of how I usually see it -- although that's not my pic, nor me on the bike, unfortunately. Again, those dropoffs are pretty mild compared to the vertical exposure on the lower sections.
Yeah, I installed it in my car, programmed to 'shuffle', and some day it'll go in a kitplane. It's entirely nonportable. But in 1997, when (I think) I put it together, there was nothing like it.
I have an ipod, that my company *gave* me. My gf has a Zen Nomad 30g. Her sister has a Zen mini (dunno the model). My brother has a Zen Nomad 30g. My mom has a Zen Nomad 30g. Oh, and besides the ipod, I also have a PJRC that currently has a 20 gig drive, because it gets unhappy with the 160 gig that I strapped on there, and the 80 I had on there died recently. That one gets by far the most comments. ("That's a WHAT?" "A ten year old MP3 player." "They *had* those back then?" "Yeah, they looked like this.")
Cool! I got it right! Miracles DO happen. (I'm *terrible* as regards math.)
MS: We have a 65% increase in subscriptions! WOO HOO!
interviewer: and how many people is that, exactly?
MS: well, 13, actually...
(dunno if my math is right...)
As you say, the Denon has a lot more functionality, and the Marantz has a button for everything. The problem is obvious: as the functionality increases, the number of buttons increases. Consider a computer: we don't have a specific button for 'launch excel, launch graph wizard, choose scatter chart'. We have to go through menus. That's a *good* thing.
Aviation GPS design is a great example. They're really complex machines, with a zillion options, and you can spend an hour programming them and getting everything set up. But when you're in the air and something goes hideously awry with your airplane, most of them have a single emergency button and you hit that and it shows you where the nearest airport is, direction and distance. So you have the best of both worlds: enormous hidden functionality, that relies on your self-education to use, and a very few specific-use buttons for time-critical applications. That's Good Design. Intermediate Design is the Denon, where everything's hidden in a menu, and Crappy Design is the computer with the 1200 key keyboard, with one key for 'launch excel, launch graph wizard, choose scatter chart' and the like. The Marantz skates because it doesn't have enough functionality to make complete specificity overwhelming, but that's not an extensible design.
I fight with this a lot, with test&measurement equipment. There are network analyzers and parametric analyzers from the '80's that are just nightmares to use because of the sheer number of buttons they have. There are modern digital oscilloscopes that have about five buttons total and you spend all your time digging around in menus trying to find the option you want. (The Keithley 2600 sourcemeter is a prime example of this: I know there's a fabulous machine hidden in there somewhere...) Then there are a very few machines, not consistently from any one vendor (although Tektronics does a pretty good job) that anticipate what keys you *need* and what functions can be hidden in menus behind multiuse/softkeys. Those are the machines everyone uses, leaving, say, the Yokogawa scope and the HP network analyzers sitting unused and lonely on the benches.
You'd appreciate this. My father was an electrical engineer. When I was about seven, he thought it'd be a good time to teach me about electricity, so the way he did it was: he gave me a toy, an old Ford spark coil with a battery. It generated 40kV or so, but at nanoamp ranges. Still, it stung like *hell*, and of course I shocked myself constantly, because it was really a cool toy: you push the button and a 2 cm spark jumps through the air. You line up a bunch of little wires with a gap between each one and push the button and little blue sparks jump from each to the next. Or to you. So I've had a raft of not-entirely-intentional high-voltage experience.
My gf's an ophthalmic tech and she's indicated she doesn't think floaters are very much associated with arcs or photon-associated damage. (I used to be a laser tech and had quite a few exposures there, too.) She said it has more to do with how your eye circulates and clears materials in the bag of clearish gel that fills eyes.
My assumption is that titanium oxide, in almost any form, is going to be a simply superb insulator. I was figuring they used the TiO2 as some sort of substrate or support structure, but the article is very nearly actual-information-free, so it's hard to tell.
It would be a *lot* more convenient if they generated an electron gradient, but much harder to design in the first place. Lazy engineers...
Weird article. Lessee.
>Dr Campbell said that unlike silicone-based solar cells, the dye- based cells are still able to operate in low-light conditions
I'm unfamiliar with these silicone-based solar cells: are those the ones you tape on Pam Anderson's breasts?
Titanium/titanium dioxide? All the dyes they talk about are organic: porphyrins are heterocyclic aromatics that complex a metal ion in their centers. Not titanium dioxide, the compound: a metallic ion all by itself. Probably iron or magnesium. Ditto hemoglobin.
With those complaints aside, one of the neat things about using naturally produced chromophores is that, well, they're naturally produced, so we could get them in enormous quantities. Similarly, they can be tuned, so you could have ones that absorb different wavelengths of light, with high efficiency, stacked, to extract more energy out of the sunlight than a single-bandgap cell like most photovoltaics.
But essentially they're trying to replicate the behavior of plants, and rather than messing about with dyes in solution, it seems way more productive (although, clearly, harder) to try and get plant cells to do this for us: harness the ion gradients in their chloroplasts, parasitize their electric potential. Most of the machinery is already there. We just need to get the voltage potential outside the cell.
There are people who stop setting up their systems? Really? That's cool. I never even get the case put back on mine, much less stop adjusting and installing and tweaking.
(That's a big benefit of a laptop: it's not always sitting around with the sides off and wires streaming out to nearby electronics, coz I can't *do* that with a laptop. I'm definitely the computer equivalent of the guy in high school who never had the hood on his car. He had the coolest car... but he was also the only person who *needed* the fire extinguisher under the passenger's seat.)
We don't currently know how to print chunks of aluminum that have the strength of cold-forged aluminum. Ten years ago we didn't know how geckos stick to walls. Now we're beginning to make things that imitate that functionality.
When engineers start using the capability of 3-d printing, they'll come up with new techniques, but the underlying idea, of being able to make things that can't *be* machined, will be sufficiently seductive that I don't think there'll be any point to the way we currently assemble things. (For the record, I don't actually think we'll be printing bearings any time soon because there are way too many materials problems, but instead of cold-forging piston conn rods, why not print them out of aluminum reinforced with printed strands of boron or silicon carbide whiskers? You should be able to get higher yield strength from that than from cold-forged.)
The point being: if an engineer designs an object, that's going to be run on 3-d fab -- which, I'd argue, is inevitable -- the value is in the information of the design, *not* the object itself, because other 3-d fabs can duplicate it. So Mrs. Mable makes her own axle bolts from the kit given to her by her nephew, who downloaded the plans from the Internet, where a disgruntled engineer posted them after losing his job.
By the way, it's not like this isn't a problem right now. I work with kitplanes. People *often* use Ace Hardware bolts to hold the wings on. (and then die.) There are lots of Mrs. Mables out there, and they suffer awful fates, and that's not ever going to change.
Yes-and-no. Replicating a Ferrari GTO is still going to be very expensive using a 3-d printer (it's not even possible right now, and will probably always be very expensive) but the really essential thing is: 3-d printers can make things *differently*. You don't need to be able to design a part that can be cut on a four-axis mill. You don't need to sand-cast an engine block with all the weird water passages. You just print it with all those things already in place. You can put tapped holes in blind locations, should you want to. Instead of an engine having 20,000 parts it might have 2000 -- just imagine, for instance, printing a crankshaft, a big fat one that has almost no bending under torque, along with the shell bearings, the piston conn rods, the maincap bearings, all in one go -- no conn rod bolts, no cap bolts, nothing. Yeah, so you can't replace conn rods or bearings when they wear, but if you can just print a new engine, why bother trying?
What I'm trying to say here is that if we were still blacksmithing and someone built a three-axis CNC, this is the equivalent of saying "but they won't be able to mill something that looks like my wrought-iron-and-wood wagon wheel!"
I don't think ice build-up would be a problem because this is so high any moisture's going to be solidly frozen already. Icing is a big problem when you're right at freezing so liquid or semiliquid water hits and freezes. When it's already solid, it usually just bounces.
here's a page with some discussion -- if you scroll down a bit there's a graph of dewpoint/temp/icing that indicates that under -15C you won't see any icing. When I got my pilot's license, what they taught was that the problem is entirely with supercooled liquid water, and "Generally, cloud ice and snow do not adhere to the airframe, and graupel and small hail may actually help to remove accreted ice."
To sum up as briefly as possible: freedom is a long-term, wide-spread benefit, while security is seen as a short-term, personal benefit. If an individual stands a (very very very slim) chance of being killed by a terrorist, that loss is far greater than any possible loss that could come from curtailed freedom. As such, the person's rational choice is to sacrifice freedom for security. It's like the old public grazing grounds: everyone has a horse, and if one person gets a second horse, everyone else loses very little but that person gains a lot, so that person has strong incentive to get a second horse. In this case it's safety.
The problem is: media tell us that there are all these DANGEROUS THINGS, and that builds a society where everyone is more worried about safety than freedom. We overestimate the potential danger of riots, terrorism, and other very unusual things, while underestimating the danger of increasing government intrusion into our lives.
The next problem is: the media only tells us what we want to read, for the most part. This is a problem that's feeding on primal, fundamental human fears. As population pressure rises, people get increasingly scared and protective of what they have, and are increasingly willing to trade the freedom they don't think they're using, for security they think they'll gain.
The sad part is: we're not getting measurably more secure, while we are getting measurably less free.
You're correct about diversity. Malcolm Gladwell wrote a New Yorker article about racial diversity, or more specifically, about why so many athletes in some sports are of African descent. A geneticist studying this is quoted: "I would say, without a doubt, that in almost any single African population-a tribe or however you want to define it-there is more genetic variation than in all the rest of the world put together..." The conclusion is that since there's more diversity, there are more people at the high -- and low -- extremes of fitness in African-derived populations.
It's an interesting article. In some other stuff I've read, that I can't find, they talk about how expectations form success (he talks a little about this) and give an example of how in the early 1900's the majority of basketball players were small Jews, because at the time it was believed that they had faster reflexes so could outmaneuver larger/slower players. The more racism changes, the more it stays the same...
Those rules would really, really slow me down, especially the never-cut-one-wire: if it's romex, and live, it's a pain to cut one wire at a time and you're as likely to meet disaster trying to strip the insulation off the middle of a wire run than just cutting it.
My rules?
Never use uninsulated tools.
Never use both hands.
Never stand on or touch anything grounded while working.
Luckily I live in a very dry environment, so my skin surface resistance is in excess of 5M. I've brushed live 220 lines and it wasn't fun, but it wasn't a problem. (I'd turned the old breaker off, but it was internally screwed so it wasn't actually off. Since I'm a nervous person I pulled one lead at a time and capped them -- great, until while trying to pull the wiring out of a conduit, it sprang, in apparent violation of physics, discarding the tightly-screwed-on wirecaps. In contrast, touching live 110 results in just a light buzzing feeling. As my brother said, when we were working on his house, "hey, touch this: the wire feels like it's vibrating." Yeah, that's coz it's live. "oh. Huh. Must be dry today." Yep.)
>Please note, US lawmakers, that quite a lot of the world and the Net *is* outside the US, BTW.
A: what's to stop them trying, anyway? What do they have to lose? Nothing. What do they have to gain? Publicity for trying to Make The Net Safe For Children.
B: what's to stop the US government from leaning very heavily on foreign countries to do things the way the US wants them done?
I agree with you, but there are a whole lot of people in the US who think that the US can solve any problem with suitable application of diplomatic force, and there's increasing evidence that they're correct.
Wrap cellphone securely in several layers of aluminum foil. Interference problems solved!
More seriously, it'd be neat if airplanes had cells associated with them, so each airplane could grab all the phone requests and relay them to ground via some no-doubt proprietary, expensive, costs-forwarded-to-customer radio signal that doesn't jam cell towers across entire states.
Presumably, we'd have sensors that detect fields, and we'd then write software to turn that info into some sort of meaningful display, so we could choose whatever we wanted. My initial thought was that field intensity would make sense to map as color, but probably field intensity -> saturation would be more reasonable. You could map color to electric potential, to indicate the direction of flow. However, I think it might be as informational to map color to magnitude with ground being somewhere in the green range, so dark red would be strongly positive and purple strongly negative. The problem rapidly becomes how to represent multidimensional information in a reasonable way -- an interface design problem.
That'd be awesome. I'd like one of those.
What I've ended up doing is: my dad was an electrical engineer, and one of the instruments he designed was an extremely sensitive, precision amplifier. If I hook the output of it to a speaker, I can take the input and wave it near a wall and *hear* the buzz of the live wires.
But I think it'd be -- or could be -- a visually spectacular sight to be able to perceive EM fields, because I imagine them being like auroras or the colors you see in plasma etch chambers. It'd make for a whole different form of art.
You say that to be funny, and it is, but it's also insightful.
One of the things about evolution is that it can only work with what it has, which is why our backs hurt all the time. Evolution can't just suddenly stick a good spine/leg support/locomotion system in, but works with what already exists, intended for quadrupeds. (This is, in essence, the area that the Irreducible Complexity crowd are attacking.)
But, look at x86 and its dominance over itanium. Itanium is a *good* design, but x86 is outcompeting the hell out of it because with a kludge here and a workaround there, it could be iteratively fixed up to outperform itanium. x86 has evolved to be the top dog despite going up against intelligent design of the itanium, showing that the criteria for success aren't always what we think they are.
for those of us who spend a lot of time rewiring our houses or playing with high-voltage and high-current devices. Coz boy howdy is it exciting when you clip a line for which you think you've turned off the breaker, and kerblammo. Takes a good-sized chunk out of wireclippers before the correct breaker trips.
/dev/brain but the tagging system doesn't like punctuation, apparently.
I tried tagging the story