You say that now, but in five years every new car will have a PC in it. Why bother with all these point-of-use microcontrollers when you can have a single-board computer that handles variable valve timing, runs the instrument display, samples the oxygen in the exhaust, plays mp3's, and displays navigation? It's already happened in aircraft, even small private ones, and it's only a matter of time before it happens in cars, too. Then the aux jack will go away again, to be replaced by wireless so you can, god help us, squirt music into your car computer... and then some bright engineer will come up with portable hologram-display technology that exceeds the wireless bandwidth, and the aux jack will come back again.
That's the thing about disruptive technology: it always breaks what happened before, and is then patched, with duct tape and epoxy, into what exists, and then is integrated seamlessly, all ready to be broken by the next disruptive technology.
LAST time we had a 'revolution' in personal music electronics, ie CD players, car radios started having aux inputs commonly available so you didn't have to buy a CD player radio. Then when everyone finally had CD players, they stopped providing aux inputs.
THE TIME BEFORE THAT when we had a 'revolution' in personal music electronics, ie portable cassette players, car radios started having aux inputs commonly available so you didn't have to buy a cassette player radio. Then when everyone finally had cassette players, they stopped providing aux inputs.
I don't know if anyone ever had portable 8-track players commonly available enough to make an aux input useful. I *do* know that Motorola was started as a company making record players for cars, hence the name: Motor Victrola. I don't think those record players were particularly portable, however.
The point being, aux inputs come into vogue every time the price differential between portable electronics and car stereos exhibiting the same functionality rise above the price that it takes to reengineer them to put an input jack in the case somewhere.
I'll go you one better: my girlfriend likes clown pron. She has two tapes thus far. Her best friend likes *midget* pron. They've been searching for midget clown pron.
I spend a lot of time rebuilding bikes out in the garage, or anywhere out of hearing range.
As a side-note (and I wish I could find a reference for this online) in WWII the American Army used primitive invisibility cloaks on their anti-submarine divebombers. The issue was: the German subs would cruise on the surface because it used less fuel, and only submerge when they were either being sneaky or bombed, so they'd be spotted and bombed. But they could dive faster than the spotting plane could get down to bomb them because they had a watchman trying to spot the spotters. (How very Neal Stephenson...) Anyway, so the Army mounted headlights, basically, along the leading edge of the divebomber's wing and cowl, and turned them on dimly, and made the dark airplane disappear against the light sky. In other words: to make the plane invisible they made it glow the same as background. So it's not necessarily absorbing the light so nothing reflects, that saves you.
I'm using MEPIS, which is ubuntu-based. The problem is that I have an evil, lying DSL modem -- the one Qwest telephone sells -- that blocks traffic somehow such that apt-get and dpkg and the like don't work. So I can't upgrade easily, and instead get stuck in dependency hell for every package I want to try and install, and generally my algorithm for installation is that if I go to install package A, and see its first dependency is package B, whose first dependency is package C, whose first dependency is package D, then I give up and do without A, because I *know* what A's second dependency is going to be at least as bad, as is B's, and probably C's, and I don't have time to spend forty eight hours just tracking down and downloading packages and fighting to get all the inconsistencies resolved. So, I do without. SOME day I'll find a DSL modem that isn't an evil, lying piece of junk and then my life will be so much better.
Oh, hey, that's a good point and one I hadn't thought about. (That's the thing with this voting stuff: it's hard to be as tricky as the hypothetical nogoodniks are.) But, still: if you physically received the only copy of the physical ballot, and then you walked it over to the separate counting machine -- which is more or less how it's done everywhere else in the world but they use pencils rather than computers -- that'll more-or-less disrupt a countback, right?
In other words: a sequential record of how people voted is a Bad Idea, but one (slightly) randomized by transport seems no worse than what we're currently doing across the rest of the US, right?
Their reasoning isn't stupid, though. It just might be one of those situations where the Best Way (from a voter security standpoint) isn't the Best Way (from a count accuracy standpoint.) And, honestly, I think I might be more likely to err towards voter security, although useful backcounting implies a conspiracy sufficiently large enough to overwhelm practically anything.
>And for good reason: the only thing worse than not having a receipt is having one you can take with you.
The GP doesn't make clear what is meant by 'receipt' and you have interpreted it 'a vote report you take home with you.' Is that the case? If your receipt from the voting booth shows the result of your vote, but is the input to the next process, the ballot counter, and *its* output is the 'I voted' sticker, then it's not a problem to have a paper receipt, because the receipt doesn't make it out of the polling place with any value. (If you take it out, you didn't vote, so it's kind of silly to put pressure on you dependent on how you would have voted.)
I would hope that nobody is proposing a system where you take home a voting record, and would interpret his statement as being that there can be no paper record moving from vote station to vote counter. But, if that's the case, why did Pennsylvania decide to do this?
Ditto that. For me it was Mepis 6.0, which is based on Ubuntu. *I* didn't have much of a problem using Fedora Core (2-4), if I screwed around a lot trying to make things work, although I never got some of my USB stuff running right. Mepis? works, for both me and my previously-windows-only-I-hate-Macs girlfriend. I won't say she likes it as much as Windows -- she uses the Win machine for photoshop -- but the linux boxes are the only things that are exposed to the internet as a whole and they do everything either of us wants (with occasional Flash exceptions.) They even do things we didn't know we wanted: options like intelligent, well-chosen context-dependent menus are really convenient. (right-click on a jpg and it'll let you rotate the image: that's really cool. right-click on anything and there's a move-to/copy-to option: I hate it that Windows doesn't have that, now.)
Bait-and-switch necessarily involves a switch, and these people aren't switching.
Bait-and-switch goes like this: "Buy item A for $X" and when you go in, they say "we don't have item A, but we do have item B, which is equivalent, and costs $Y" where Y > X. That's the switch: they tell you they cannot sell you what they advertised, as the excuse for charging you more than the advertised price.
In this case, they're saying "Buy A for $X" and when you go in they say "we will only sell you A for $Y" where Y > X. That's a completely different, and even slimier, action: it's false advertising. But it isn't bait-and-switch.
How about "when they can watch TV movies without playing cops-n-robbers"? Then it's a bit trickier. Children clearly imitate behavior they see on the TV. Children clearly recognize *some* of the behavior they see on TV is not real. The question is: how do they determine which is which, and at what age? For that matter, I've heard old ladies at the supermarket talking about the UFO stories in Weekly World News, clearly thinking that it's an exaggeration of a truthful event. THEY don't seem to be able to tell the difference between fantasy and reality. There isn't a point at which all people can make that distinction. There are probably circumstances under which nobody can make that distinction. The problem for *reasonable* people is to figure out how to set the threshold such that the very large majority of children are only exposed to things they can handle emotionally and intellectually. The problem with that is that there are a large number of *unreasonable* people, who want 100% of children to be protected from anything that might warp their little minds -- and those same people would be perfectly happy to extend their bans on video games to adults, while they're at it. That's what we're fighting, is unreasonable people, and the way to do it is probably to educate the fence-sitters and people who aren't educated about the situation so they come down on our side rather than the control-the-children-ban-everything side.
I like the idea of the 500-in-1 kits, and have used a couple for education purposes (I volunteer as a technology teacher for primary education courses.) The nice thing with the kits is that everything's tested, so if you do the experiment as listed, it will work. They also often have safety stuff built in: the LED's have current-limiting resistors integral to the LED so you can't burn them out. If the student isn't particularly motivated, is a sort of passive person, the 500-in-1 kits make a lot of sense. But if the student is motivated, buy all the Forest Mims Shop Notes notebooks -- the ones Radio Shack used to sell -- and go to jameco.com and buy some protoboard (get a big one, spend the money, you won't regret it -- or buy about 10 of the small 20-pin ones -- and just work your way through the notebooks. Start with basic, then do logic, sensors, 555/comparator/opamps, and so on. Mims has better explanations than most 500-in-1 manuals, because he's writing for adults not kids, and does some really interesting, funny things like lightning detectors and multi-output function generators that are surprisingly useful. Because the notebooks are all standalones he doesn't do as much building on previous work as you can do in a 500-in-one, but he spends more time exploring the math and physics behind what's going on. And then go buy Hill and Horowitz, "The Art Of Electronics", and read it, and you can get a job as an electronics technician.
That's why I was on about the 'voices in my head told me to burn the church down' -- it is completely impossible to blame the voices, because they're not there. The problem is the person who hears those voices. There are plenty, *plenty* of people who would love to ban books like Peter Pan because they give kids ideas: witness the number of schools that have discussed banning Harry Potter books.
Consider this continuum: in the Middle Ages, priests didn't want people reading the Bible because they weren't sophisticated enough to understand it and it would upset them. Now, some people want to keep people from reading books about witchcraft, a lot of people want to keep people from reading websites about making explosives, and a huge number of people want to keep people from playing violent video games. It's all about censorship and deciding that you have better judgment than other people do, so you should control what they get to see. That's true for children, but at some point it's not true anymore, and that's the point at which a child becomes an adult.
As I said in another subpost in this thread: we blame the videogames because society wants to believe that children are innocent, and are corrupted by exposure to Bad Ideas. Whatever the kid does, it's always blamed on something that 'made' the kid do that (when, in fact, kids have always done awful things, because they have lousy judgment and poor cause-effect analysis.)
*I* think parents have become control freaks. Up until the '50's children were born with hideous deformities on a regular basis, died of awful diseases in childhood, got limbs cut off in stupid accidents, but since antibiotics and safety equipment has come into regular usage, Americans in particular think life has to be safe, especially for children, so they try and control their children's environment, control what they see and who they talk do and what they do and what they read, rather than just letting the kids be kids. It's not that kids seem far more out of control: it's that the parents think their kids are out of control and want to CHANGE it.
There are a bunch of loonie-bin theories on why people do bad things. "Satan made me do it" is maybe the stupidest and most annoying avoidance of responsibility of all of them, but a lot of people believe that children are innately precious and good, and only learn badness by observing badness and imitating it. (It's a Judeo-Christian thing, that has to do with ideas of being born perfect and falling from grace, like Adam.) There is a school of taught-to-be-bad (exemplified in the musical 'South Pacific' and the song "you have to be taught to hate" but a very large number of people think it's learned, rather than taught, and if only we could keep our kids away from those awful bad examples (the bad kid down the block whose father is a drunkard so nobody allows their kids to play with him, or the TV and its horrible shows, or whatever.) *I* believe that 'evil' is behavior that benefits an individual at significant cost to others, or society at large, which means I believe that selfishness is evil. But the thing is: it's beneficial to the individual (in the short term.) So there's a motivation to be evil (by my definition) and as a result there's a continuous balancing act by an individual to maximize personal gain while not actually being evil. I argue that's why evil exists and always will exist: that it's an emergent characteristic of society. So, I don't think evil is learned behavior: it's natural behavior because it benefits the individual, and the distinction between 'good' and 'evil' is extremely tricky because it's dependent on the situation and the person's perception of the situation. Is cheating on income tax Bad? How about insurance fraud? How about taking home pencils from work? How about taking pencils from your neighbor's house? How about taking your neighbor's car? They're all the same fundamental action, but we can easily quantify the difference in Badness between them -- so clearly Badness is not binary.
By the way, I would argue that *my* idea of what constitutes good and bad behavior isn't a construct of my society, but I'd just be editorializing: I don't have any great support for it.
I agree entirely: very few people are influenced by virtual representations of reality. The thing is: that's not the perception. We're not fighting facts here, we're fighting assumptions, and people assume that young adults learn from video games the same way they learn from speak-and-spell games. The question is really: at what age (or more properly at what state of maturity) do children manage to separate reality from virtual? The games-are-evil crowd says very late or never, the games-are-great crowd says real young, like, totally, dude. The answer's somewhere inbetween. It'd be awfully nice to have a test that could determine where it is for a given person.
Anyone who interacts with small children -- or even monkeys or parrots -- has seen them imitate behavior. Speech acquisition is imitative, interaction patterns are imitative. It takes no leap of imagination whatsoever to assume, as society does, that propensity towards violence is similarly learned (especially if you believe, as many do, that humans are innately nice and only do bad things because they're taught to.) I think the imitation behavior is so obvious, that the burden of proof is on the people who deny a connection, who say that humans *don't* get more violent from seeing violence. I personally believe that they generally don't because they have the cognitive ability to analyze behavior and decide which is acceptable and which isn't. A lot of people don't believe this, or believe only smart people can do this, or only adults, and they may be right. Forethought, and the ability to predict future events based on current actions, is a hallmark of intelligence. Not everyone has it. I think it's possible the reason the link between video games and violence is 'tenuous' is because for the large majority of people, there *isn't* any link, but for some impressionable, young, or screwed-up people, there *is* a tendency to imitate, because they're not good at separating reality from fantasy. But, really, that's no different than people who hear voices in their heads telling them to burn down churches. We don't blame the voices for the churches being burnt down, we say the people have problems. I suspect it's the same thing with video games. But, for people who dislike technology or new things they don't understand, it's easier to demonize the video game/comic book/whatever than to say that the people involved are the problem.
Interesting side-note to the fault lubrication thing: where I live, Denver, there were a series of earthquakes in the '50's and '60's. Small ones, to be sure, but still, since this area hasn't had noticeable earthquakes in centuries, as far as anyone can tell, it made people wonder. Specifically, it made a bunch of mine owners wonder why their shafts kept collapsing and shifting -- on a regular schedule. Like, once a month, near the end of the month, there would be a quake.
It turns out that Rocky Mountain Arsenal was overproducing nerve gas for our enormous stores of chemical weapons that we're not supposed to have, so to get rid of them they had the bright idea of injecting them down into the earth a couple of miles. Tons, and tons, and tons, of nerve gas.
Talk about bad ideas in action...
If you do a googlesearch on injection-caused earthquakes there are hundreds of hits. This is one of the ones that talks about the Arsenal injection earthquakes.
Water is the *reason* some volcanos explode. Quick geology lesson: there are two main types of volcanos, the granitic ones and the basaltic ones. The basaltic ones don't have much water in the stone, so when they erupt they just sort of ooze lava. (aa: the rough, jagged stuff, pahoehoe, the stuff that's more like toothpaste squeezing out of a tube.) These are exemplified by Mauna Kea, Mauna Loa, and Kilauea, which has been erupting more or less continuously for hundreds of years. Iceland's volcanos are mostly the same sort. (although there's some added excitement because one or two are under glaciers, so when one erupts nobody knows until suddenly a cubic kilometer of water comes sloshing down the valley.) Granitic volcanos, on the other hand, have lots of water in the matrix of the stone, but the water isn't boiling even though it's hundreds of degrees because of the massive pressure of the overburden. When the volcano has grown enough, an area of the overburden has thinned sufficiently that locally the water boils, expanding by about 2000x, and blows that chunk of the overburden off -- and as soon as it does that, all the water around it flashes as well, and the whole top of the mountain comes off in one enormous blast. Those are the exciting volcanos: St. Helens, Ranier, in the US, Krakatoa, Pompeii, and the like. Weirdly, basaltic volcanos, the dribbly ones with lower water content, *tend* to be oceanic, because the crust over the ocean is generally basaltic, whereas the granitic explosive ones with high water content, tend to be continental because the crust over the continents is granitic. (That's because basalt tends to be denser than granite, so the granite floats on top, gathering together into continents, while the basalt cruises around below, the way scum collects on soup.)
Massively oversimplified, there are other types of volcanos, this is what I remember learning in physical geography ten years ago, blah blah blah. Just remember: granitic volcanos are the ones to worry about.
Dunno about suits, but every time my house gets tagged, I get a note on the front door that says I have 24 hours to clean it up/remove it before I am cited and ticketed. The end result is the same: because I'm hosting an unpopular opinion, I have to remove it or pay money. Cities do this all the time, and it seems to be completely acceptable behavior. How is this different than your blogger/website?
LED's *aren't* the hands-down winners for home space lighting. They're the hands-down winners for longevity, they're extremely good at not dumping IR or UV into the room, but something like 70% of the power you put into them turns into heat at the LED itself. Back in the lab we have an LED that can light up the room. It draws 6 amps through the one LED, and it's blindingly bright. It's also attached to a Socket A heatsink with integral fan, that's running flat-out trying to keep up with the heat that die is producing. At a recent optics show, a guy was demoing his company's new LED car headlights, with the tagline that if you used them you'd never have to worry about your headlights getting iced over -- coz the enormous fans they used to pull the heat off the dies exhausted across the headlight covers, keeping them uncomfortably hot even in cold conditions. There are areas where the LED is flat-out the winner: traffic lights. There are areas where it's probably going to win: car taillights. But there are areas where it's really questionable whether it's going to win, or even compete, and space lighting is one of those areas. Fluorescents are very, very good in that space, and LED development has to come up with massive gains to overcome the gains in fluorescent technology and win any market there at all.
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You say that now, but in five years every new car will have a PC in it. Why bother with all these point-of-use microcontrollers when you can have a single-board computer that handles variable valve timing, runs the instrument display, samples the oxygen in the exhaust, plays mp3's, and displays navigation? It's already happened in aircraft, even small private ones, and it's only a matter of time before it happens in cars, too. Then the aux jack will go away again, to be replaced by wireless so you can, god help us, squirt music into your car computer... and then some bright engineer will come up with portable hologram-display technology that exceeds the wireless bandwidth, and the aux jack will come back again.
That's the thing about disruptive technology: it always breaks what happened before, and is then patched, with duct tape and epoxy, into what exists, and then is integrated seamlessly, all ready to be broken by the next disruptive technology.
Close, close: aerosols contain nitrous oxide, while viagra affects nitric oxide. But I still think you should get points for it.
I'm a coulrophobe, is the problem with that otherwise-great plan.
Plus, every time ya want to break out the sillystring, it turns out the aerosol's all leaked out, and it's just a big letdown.
LAST time we had a 'revolution' in personal music electronics, ie CD players, car radios started having aux inputs commonly available so you didn't have to buy a CD player radio. Then when everyone finally had CD players, they stopped providing aux inputs.
THE TIME BEFORE THAT when we had a 'revolution' in personal music electronics, ie portable cassette players, car radios started having aux inputs commonly available so you didn't have to buy a cassette player radio. Then when everyone finally had cassette players, they stopped providing aux inputs.
I don't know if anyone ever had portable 8-track players commonly available enough to make an aux input useful. I *do* know that Motorola was started as a company making record players for cars, hence the name: Motor Victrola. I don't think those record players were particularly portable, however.
The point being, aux inputs come into vogue every time the price differential between portable electronics and car stereos exhibiting the same functionality rise above the price that it takes to reengineer them to put an input jack in the case somewhere.
I'll go you one better: my girlfriend likes clown pron. She has two tapes thus far. Her best friend likes *midget* pron. They've been searching for midget clown pron.
I spend a lot of time rebuilding bikes out in the garage, or anywhere out of hearing range.
As a side-note (and I wish I could find a reference for this online) in WWII the American Army used primitive invisibility cloaks on their anti-submarine divebombers. The issue was: the German subs would cruise on the surface because it used less fuel, and only submerge when they were either being sneaky or bombed, so they'd be spotted and bombed. But they could dive faster than the spotting plane could get down to bomb them because they had a watchman trying to spot the spotters. (How very Neal Stephenson...) Anyway, so the Army mounted headlights, basically, along the leading edge of the divebomber's wing and cowl, and turned them on dimly, and made the dark airplane disappear against the light sky. In other words: to make the plane invisible they made it glow the same as background. So it's not necessarily absorbing the light so nothing reflects, that saves you.
I'm using MEPIS, which is ubuntu-based. The problem is that I have an evil, lying DSL modem -- the one Qwest telephone sells -- that blocks traffic somehow such that apt-get and dpkg and the like don't work. So I can't upgrade easily, and instead get stuck in dependency hell for every package I want to try and install, and generally my algorithm for installation is that if I go to install package A, and see its first dependency is package B, whose first dependency is package C, whose first dependency is package D, then I give up and do without A, because I *know* what A's second dependency is going to be at least as bad, as is B's, and probably C's, and I don't have time to spend forty eight hours just tracking down and downloading packages and fighting to get all the inconsistencies resolved. So, I do without. SOME day I'll find a DSL modem that isn't an evil, lying piece of junk and then my life will be so much better.
Oh, hey, that's a good point and one I hadn't thought about. (That's the thing with this voting stuff: it's hard to be as tricky as the hypothetical nogoodniks are.) But, still: if you physically received the only copy of the physical ballot, and then you walked it over to the separate counting machine -- which is more or less how it's done everywhere else in the world but they use pencils rather than computers -- that'll more-or-less disrupt a countback, right?
In other words: a sequential record of how people voted is a Bad Idea, but one (slightly) randomized by transport seems no worse than what we're currently doing across the rest of the US, right?
Their reasoning isn't stupid, though. It just might be one of those situations where the Best Way (from a voter security standpoint) isn't the Best Way (from a count accuracy standpoint.) And, honestly, I think I might be more likely to err towards voter security, although useful backcounting implies a conspiracy sufficiently large enough to overwhelm practically anything.
I'll take a look. Mostly all we need is crop/resize but getting GIMP running under KDE is too much of a hassle. Thanks for the tip.
>And for good reason: the only thing worse than not having a receipt is having one you can take with you.
The GP doesn't make clear what is meant by 'receipt' and you have interpreted it 'a vote report you take home with you.' Is that the case? If your receipt from the voting booth shows the result of your vote, but is the input to the next process, the ballot counter, and *its* output is the 'I voted' sticker, then it's not a problem to have a paper receipt, because the receipt doesn't make it out of the polling place with any value. (If you take it out, you didn't vote, so it's kind of silly to put pressure on you dependent on how you would have voted.)
I would hope that nobody is proposing a system where you take home a voting record, and would interpret his statement as being that there can be no paper record moving from vote station to vote counter. But, if that's the case, why did Pennsylvania decide to do this?
Ditto that. For me it was Mepis 6.0, which is based on Ubuntu. *I* didn't have much of a problem using Fedora Core (2-4), if I screwed around a lot trying to make things work, although I never got some of my USB stuff running right. Mepis? works, for both me and my previously-windows-only-I-hate-Macs girlfriend. I won't say she likes it as much as Windows -- she uses the Win machine for photoshop -- but the linux boxes are the only things that are exposed to the internet as a whole and they do everything either of us wants (with occasional Flash exceptions.) They even do things we didn't know we wanted: options like intelligent, well-chosen context-dependent menus are really convenient. (right-click on a jpg and it'll let you rotate the image: that's really cool. right-click on anything and there's a move-to/copy-to option: I hate it that Windows doesn't have that, now.)
I was just discussing this on another forum.
Bait-and-switch necessarily involves a switch, and these people aren't switching.
Bait-and-switch goes like this: "Buy item A for $X" and when you go in, they say "we don't have item A, but we do have item B, which is equivalent, and costs $Y" where Y > X. That's the switch: they tell you they cannot sell you what they advertised, as the excuse for charging you more than the advertised price.
In this case, they're saying "Buy A for $X" and when you go in they say "we will only sell you A for $Y" where Y > X. That's a completely different, and even slimier, action: it's false advertising. But it isn't bait-and-switch.
How about "when they can watch TV movies without playing cops-n-robbers"? Then it's a bit trickier. Children clearly imitate behavior they see on the TV. Children clearly recognize *some* of the behavior they see on TV is not real. The question is: how do they determine which is which, and at what age?
For that matter, I've heard old ladies at the supermarket talking about the UFO stories in Weekly World News, clearly thinking that it's an exaggeration of a truthful event. THEY don't seem to be able to tell the difference between fantasy and reality. There isn't a point at which all people can make that distinction. There are probably circumstances under which nobody can make that distinction. The problem for *reasonable* people is to figure out how to set the threshold such that the very large majority of children are only exposed to things they can handle emotionally and intellectually. The problem with that is that there are a large number of *unreasonable* people, who want 100% of children to be protected from anything that might warp their little minds -- and those same people would be perfectly happy to extend their bans on video games to adults, while they're at it. That's what we're fighting, is unreasonable people, and the way to do it is probably to educate the fence-sitters and people who aren't educated about the situation so they come down on our side rather than the control-the-children-ban-everything side.
and our IT guy says "Vista adoption by the company is a minimum of two years out."
>So the FBI can't use it against him.
"can't" != "won't".
I like the idea of the 500-in-1 kits, and have used a couple for education purposes (I volunteer as a technology teacher for primary education courses.) The nice thing with the kits is that everything's tested, so if you do the experiment as listed, it will work. They also often have safety stuff built in: the LED's have current-limiting resistors integral to the LED so you can't burn them out.
If the student isn't particularly motivated, is a sort of passive person, the 500-in-1 kits make a lot of sense. But if the student is motivated, buy all the Forest Mims Shop Notes notebooks -- the ones Radio Shack used to sell -- and go to jameco.com and buy some protoboard (get a big one, spend the money, you won't regret it -- or buy about 10 of the small 20-pin ones -- and just work your way through the notebooks. Start with basic, then do logic, sensors, 555/comparator/opamps, and so on. Mims has better explanations than most 500-in-1 manuals, because he's writing for adults not kids, and does some really interesting, funny things like lightning detectors and multi-output function generators that are surprisingly useful. Because the notebooks are all standalones he doesn't do as much building on previous work as you can do in a 500-in-one, but he spends more time exploring the math and physics behind what's going on.
And then go buy Hill and Horowitz, "The Art Of Electronics", and read it, and you can get a job as an electronics technician.
That's why I was on about the 'voices in my head told me to burn the church down' -- it is completely impossible to blame the voices, because they're not there. The problem is the person who hears those voices. There are plenty, *plenty* of people who would love to ban books like Peter Pan because they give kids ideas: witness the number of schools that have discussed banning Harry Potter books.
Consider this continuum: in the Middle Ages, priests didn't want people reading the Bible because they weren't sophisticated enough to understand it and it would upset them. Now, some people want to keep people from reading books about witchcraft, a lot of people want to keep people from reading websites about making explosives, and a huge number of people want to keep people from playing violent video games. It's all about censorship and deciding that you have better judgment than other people do, so you should control what they get to see. That's true for children, but at some point it's not true anymore, and that's the point at which a child becomes an adult.
As I said in another subpost in this thread: we blame the videogames because society wants to believe that children are innocent, and are corrupted by exposure to Bad Ideas. Whatever the kid does, it's always blamed on something that 'made' the kid do that (when, in fact, kids have always done awful things, because they have lousy judgment and poor cause-effect analysis.)
*I* think parents have become control freaks. Up until the '50's children were born with hideous deformities on a regular basis, died of awful diseases in childhood, got limbs cut off in stupid accidents, but since antibiotics and safety equipment has come into regular usage, Americans in particular think life has to be safe, especially for children, so they try and control their children's environment, control what they see and who they talk do and what they do and what they read, rather than just letting the kids be kids. It's not that kids seem far more out of control: it's that the parents think their kids are out of control and want to CHANGE it.
There are a bunch of loonie-bin theories on why people do bad things. "Satan made me do it" is maybe the stupidest and most annoying avoidance of responsibility of all of them, but a lot of people believe that children are innately precious and good, and only learn badness by observing badness and imitating it. (It's a Judeo-Christian thing, that has to do with ideas of being born perfect and falling from grace, like Adam.) There is a school of taught-to-be-bad (exemplified in the musical 'South Pacific' and the song "you have to be taught to hate" but a very large number of people think it's learned, rather than taught, and if only we could keep our kids away from those awful bad examples (the bad kid down the block whose father is a drunkard so nobody allows their kids to play with him, or the TV and its horrible shows, or whatever.) *I* believe that 'evil' is behavior that benefits an individual at significant cost to others, or society at large, which means I believe that selfishness is evil. But the thing is: it's beneficial to the individual (in the short term.) So there's a motivation to be evil (by my definition) and as a result there's a continuous balancing act by an individual to maximize personal gain while not actually being evil. I argue that's why evil exists and always will exist: that it's an emergent characteristic of society. So, I don't think evil is learned behavior: it's natural behavior because it benefits the individual, and the distinction between 'good' and 'evil' is extremely tricky because it's dependent on the situation and the person's perception of the situation. Is cheating on income tax Bad? How about insurance fraud? How about taking home pencils from work? How about taking pencils from your neighbor's house? How about taking your neighbor's car? They're all the same fundamental action, but we can easily quantify the difference in Badness between them -- so clearly Badness is not binary.
By the way, I would argue that *my* idea of what constitutes good and bad behavior isn't a construct of my society, but I'd just be editorializing: I don't have any great support for it.
I agree entirely: very few people are influenced by virtual representations of reality. The thing is: that's not the perception. We're not fighting facts here, we're fighting assumptions, and people assume that young adults learn from video games the same way they learn from speak-and-spell games. The question is really: at what age (or more properly at what state of maturity) do children manage to separate reality from virtual? The games-are-evil crowd says very late or never, the games-are-great crowd says real young, like, totally, dude. The answer's somewhere inbetween. It'd be awfully nice to have a test that could determine where it is for a given person.
Anyone who interacts with small children -- or even monkeys or parrots -- has seen them imitate behavior. Speech acquisition is imitative, interaction patterns are imitative. It takes no leap of imagination whatsoever to assume, as society does, that propensity towards violence is similarly learned (especially if you believe, as many do, that humans are innately nice and only do bad things because they're taught to.) I think the imitation behavior is so obvious, that the burden of proof is on the people who deny a connection, who say that humans *don't* get more violent from seeing violence. I personally believe that they generally don't because they have the cognitive ability to analyze behavior and decide which is acceptable and which isn't. A lot of people don't believe this, or believe only smart people can do this, or only adults, and they may be right. Forethought, and the ability to predict future events based on current actions, is a hallmark of intelligence. Not everyone has it. I think it's possible the reason the link between video games and violence is 'tenuous' is because for the large majority of people, there *isn't* any link, but for some impressionable, young, or screwed-up people, there *is* a tendency to imitate, because they're not good at separating reality from fantasy. But, really, that's no different than people who hear voices in their heads telling them to burn down churches. We don't blame the voices for the churches being burnt down, we say the people have problems. I suspect it's the same thing with video games. But, for people who dislike technology or new things they don't understand, it's easier to demonize the video game/comic book/whatever than to say that the people involved are the problem.
Interesting side-note to the fault lubrication thing: where I live, Denver, there were a series of earthquakes in the '50's and '60's. Small ones, to be sure, but still, since this area hasn't had noticeable earthquakes in centuries, as far as anyone can tell, it made people wonder. Specifically, it made a bunch of mine owners wonder why their shafts kept collapsing and shifting -- on a regular schedule. Like, once a month, near the end of the month, there would be a quake.
It turns out that Rocky Mountain Arsenal was overproducing nerve gas for our enormous stores of chemical weapons that we're not supposed to have, so to get rid of them they had the bright idea of injecting them down into the earth a couple of miles. Tons, and tons, and tons, of nerve gas.
Talk about bad ideas in action...
If you do a googlesearch on injection-caused earthquakes there are hundreds of hits. This is one of the ones that talks about the Arsenal injection earthquakes.
Water is the *reason* some volcanos explode.
Quick geology lesson: there are two main types of volcanos, the granitic ones and the basaltic ones. The basaltic ones don't have much water in the stone, so when they erupt they just sort of ooze lava. (aa: the rough, jagged stuff, pahoehoe, the stuff that's more like toothpaste squeezing out of a tube.) These are exemplified by Mauna Kea, Mauna Loa, and Kilauea, which has been erupting more or less continuously for hundreds of years. Iceland's volcanos are mostly the same sort. (although there's some added excitement because one or two are under glaciers, so when one erupts nobody knows until suddenly a cubic kilometer of water comes sloshing down the valley.) Granitic volcanos, on the other hand, have lots of water in the matrix of the stone, but the water isn't boiling even though it's hundreds of degrees because of the massive pressure of the overburden. When the volcano has grown enough, an area of the overburden has thinned sufficiently that locally the water boils, expanding by about 2000x, and blows that chunk of the overburden off -- and as soon as it does that, all the water around it flashes as well, and the whole top of the mountain comes off in one enormous blast. Those are the exciting volcanos: St. Helens, Ranier, in the US, Krakatoa, Pompeii, and the like.
Weirdly, basaltic volcanos, the dribbly ones with lower water content, *tend* to be oceanic, because the crust over the ocean is generally basaltic, whereas the granitic explosive ones with high water content, tend to be continental because the crust over the continents is granitic. (That's because basalt tends to be denser than granite, so the granite floats on top, gathering together into continents, while the basalt cruises around below, the way scum collects on soup.)
Massively oversimplified, there are other types of volcanos, this is what I remember learning in physical geography ten years ago, blah blah blah. Just remember: granitic volcanos are the ones to worry about.
Dunno about suits, but every time my house gets tagged, I get a note on the front door that says I have 24 hours to clean it up/remove it before I am cited and ticketed. The end result is the same: because I'm hosting an unpopular opinion, I have to remove it or pay money. Cities do this all the time, and it seems to be completely acceptable behavior. How is this different than your blogger/website?
LED's *aren't* the hands-down winners for home space lighting. They're the hands-down winners for longevity, they're extremely good at not dumping IR or UV into the room, but something like 70% of the power you put into them turns into heat at the LED itself. Back in the lab we have an LED that can light up the room. It draws 6 amps through the one LED, and it's blindingly bright. It's also attached to a Socket A heatsink with integral fan, that's running flat-out trying to keep up with the heat that die is producing.
At a recent optics show, a guy was demoing his company's new LED car headlights, with the tagline that if you used them you'd never have to worry about your headlights getting iced over -- coz the enormous fans they used to pull the heat off the dies exhausted across the headlight covers, keeping them uncomfortably hot even in cold conditions.
There are areas where the LED is flat-out the winner: traffic lights. There are areas where it's probably going to win: car taillights. But there are areas where it's really questionable whether it's going to win, or even compete, and space lighting is one of those areas. Fluorescents are very, very good in that space, and LED development has to come up with massive gains to overcome the gains in fluorescent technology and win any market there at all.