That's likely -- but the stuff in the background, even in the lecture room, was all not just physics, but laser physics: stuff you see in second-semester physical chemistry, three and four state metastability diagrams, stuff like that. Even at CalTech, that's probably on less than 5% of the blackboards at any given time.
Then there's the awful plot. Sigh. I had such hopes...
But a lot of it is subconscious. Google "human ovulation smell" or scent or whatever. (That should be relatively worksafe, as opposed to, say "sniffing panties" which is how the original research was done, AFAIK.) Here's a recent article about how men can tell when women are ovulating. Here's a lit review from 2001, discussing just how good humans are at detecting pheromones, unconsciously. (I can't help but wonder what 'subconscious' means in this sense: if you smell vomit and want desperately to leave the airplane, is that subconscious? is a dog smelling my hamburger and coming over to say hi subconscious? there are lots of areas where behavior is affected by things that a person might not be fully aware of, but if asked might be able to remember -- is that conscious? For instance, when I'm riding my bike down the path and see someone walking along talking to nobody, is it a crazy person or is it a person that's talking on a cellphone? I mostly determine that by some intuitive sense about how the person is moving: lurching around, uncoordinated movement -- but I don't *think* about it. I just know. But afterwards, I have a conscious realization: that person {is|isn't} crazy. Read "Blink" by Malcolm Gladwell for more about that.)
Anyway, there have been studies done since the '70's, IIRC, exploring how good humans are at smelling things: slow, but still very good.
Yeah, but then they advise you to cancel Phase 2, and you *don't* cancel Phase 2, and all hell breaks loose and next thing you know, crazed physicists are clamping electrodes to their tongues and the world's about to get nuked.
As an ex-laser-freak, I note that the physics and math in the background of "Real Genius" -- the stuff written on chalkboards and equipment on the benches -- was all good science. It was just the stuff in the foreground that sucked. I think that's often the case with movies intended for the camp/dork crowd, that they get people with some experience in the subject to at least try and prop it up.
One of the things I found most charming about BB (which might be my favorite movie) was precisely the sense of time: how the Professor and Emilio Lizardo were using an electric trolley controlled by knife switches to get to the required velocity, BB was using a Ford F-series pickup with a jet, and the Black Lectroids had a full-on starship, all to do the same thing. I also loved the set design in the Black Lectroid starship, with cryrogenic fluids flowing through channels grown in the walls. That would've been a fun movie to work on.
The script for the sequel (BB against the world crime league) exists, but it's really hard to get your hands on, and is kind of disappointing. I still hope it'll happen.
Based on my own experience, and those of friends who would rather pay $$ for instrument flightsim training rather than $$$ for actual training (for getting your instrument rating, you're already allowed to use some flight sims for accredited training) flightsims are incredibly useful. Even MS Flightsim does a fantastic job of getting you used to using the equipment (*if* they have it simulated: this isn't going to teach you how to use a Garmin 530, frinstance.) You get a feel for technique and can get great at translating radio calls into establishing holding patterns and stuff like that. Even with tricky stuff, like flying ground-reference maneuvers with a strong crosswind, flightsims are an amazing help.
And then you go to land in a real plane, having spent many hours in flightsims, and boy does it show. My instructor said I flew like a professional pilot with 500 hours of time until that last thirty seconds on final, when I flew like I'd just solo'ed. (Well, I *had*, basically.)
The point being: if you use a training aid it could mask real-world inadequacy, and a falsely confident pilot rarely lives to figure out what went hideously awry.
With all that said, if it's the copilot learning this way and the pilot's the PIC on final, or has quick access to the controls, it's probably a great idea, and it's sure way cheaper and way less risk on students (at any level) and their instructors.
They were steel in '43, and the so-called shell-casing bronze in '44-'45, and the more standard bronze the rest of the run until 1982.
By the way, if you stack some pre-'81 pennies alternating with post-'82 pennies and heat the whole mass over a bunsen burner, when the zinc melts the whole works fuses with a blue flash and you can pry big pretty pieces of brass out of the mass. It works much better if you melt the old ones, then drop the new ones into the melt, because the zinc dissolves before oxidizing, but it takes *quite* a burner to melt a bunch of copper.
(you probably already know) Half-dollars were still 40% silver until 1967. I used to make a reasonable amount of money buying $20 of halves, sorting out the 40% silver ones, and reselling them for their silver value, which was greater than their face value.
Melting down coins for their metal value has been going on for 100 years. It was especially bad before the US government let gold and silver prices rise to market values because within the US, it wasn't worth melting them, but if you exported them you could make an enormous amount of money, since the market value of gold and silver was 5x what the controlled value was in the US. I think the US stopped that in the late '60's?
She thinks the word 'Christian' means 'one who lives like Christ' -- which, of course, is exactly what it does mean. She doesn't think that 'Christian' means you have to believe that women aren't allowed to speak in church, or that men aren't allowed to cut their hair, or that there is a discrete location called Heaven, all of which she thinks are parts of the Bible that are the words of the writers, rather than the word of God. Her church generally feels that the most basic tenet of Christianity is "love your neighbor as yourself." (Mark 12:28-31.) Which, of course, is exactly what the most basic tenet of Christianity is, since that's what Jesus said it was.
There are many, many people who agree with your philosophy. It pretty much is exactly what I believe, and most of my family. They're very active in a local Baptist church, where most of the members also believe something similar. My mom teaches Sunday School and has told kids that she doesn't really believe in Heaven, that for her 'everlasting life' is the good memories people have of you after you die, based on the generous things you've done for other people, and while other church members might argue with her, they think it's good she's teaching. So, there are already churches working along the lines you're talking about. There are problems with this approach, though: basically, people who go down this route aren't anywhere nearly as enthusiastic/desperate/avid as people who hew to the evangelical ideology, so the churches tend to be less active, have lower attendance, and so forth. Coz, basically, it's a smooth glide from there to some flavor of weak atheism.
Anyway, I think you're on the right track, for what it's worth, and I'd go to your church.
And, unfortunately, there are hundreds of other writers who *aren't* asking that, like Annie Proulx, and hundreds more who are *trying* to sound like that. (They should be found, and shot.)
>Companies don't normally kill off profitable products and services, not even evil/stupid corporations.
I'd have to disagree with that. I've watched three large companies for whom I've worked -- all Fortune 500 companies -- kill off profitable products and services that were not as profitable as they wanted. The company I'm working for right now sold off three business units because they didn't have a profit margin above 30%. We're only keeping the parts of the company that can beat 30%: if you don't, you're out the door. There are probably a lot of fields where companies can't afford to throw away marginal profit, but there are plenty of fields where it's not worth chasing chump change when there's a 50% profit margin to be hunted down and seized.
If that's the case, it's quite possible another, smaller and more agile, company could live very comfortably on the profits from this discard.
I haven't done the calculations, but I've read from a reasonably reputable source, New Scientist, that the Antarctic contains enough water to raise the world's oceans 75 meters. I suspect at some temperature, thermal expansion of the ocean would be greater than 75 meters, but I'm guessing, from other stuff I've read, that it'd take more heat to do that, than to melt the Antarctic. In other words, for a small worldwide increase in temp, I think the melting Antarctic would be the dominant effect. Of course, it's trickier than that, because the ice of the Antarctic itself would expand as it heated. (Well, first it shrinks a little, to 4C, but after THAT...)
However, nobody seems to anticipate the Antarctic melting, or at least not the much larger Eastern portion.
It's not that MarketWatch is contemplating their own navel: it's that they're speaking to their audience. Their audience is heavily invested in a set of business practices in which short-term profit is the definition of success. Any business practice that operates outside that definition cannot, in their minds, be a success, of course, so they question it. The underlying idea -- which they share with any evangelical group -- is that you must try to convince people that what you're doing is the only good way, and other ways must somehow be wrong, for fear they will encroach on your territory. MarketWatch writes to reassure its readers that they've made the right choices, knowing that reassured readers will come back for more.
>I'm old enough to remember when a steering wheel was just a steering wheel...
I bring you the steering wheel of the 1958 Edsel, which featured the Teletouch shifting system, available starting in 1956. And we all know how well the Edsel did.
TOO much simplicity bad. But there's a reason we like hierarchical storage, menu systems, and information organization in general: the more options, the longer it takes to find what you're looking for.
These two writers desperately need to read "The Paradox Of Choice" by Barry Schwartz. He argues persuasively that more choice leads to more frustration and more long-term dissatisfaction with the choices that have been made.
I agree with your point, but I think you're missing the larger picture. It's not that The Daily Show is a joke, and that makes relying on it as a primary information source stupid. It's that many people feel it's no more stupid to rely on The Daily Show than Fox News, or maybe even CNN, and the people who think this way are generally better-informed than the people who watch FN or CNN. It's a little like the linux/windows security debate: the people who use linux and say it's more secure are the sorts of people who, if they were using windows, wouldn't do the sorts of things that make windows vulnerable. People can derive good or bad information from most sources. Right now, the sort of people who can derive good information, are watching The Daily Show.
(my point being, that CS people and the users of their technology, have avidly adopted acronymization -- probably even more than the military (who are infamous for their usage.) In either case, it's the beginnings of a new dialect, optimized to convey the information that's important to them.)
law of unintended consequences strikes again!
on
Saving U.S. Science
·
· Score: 1
>Hell, in some parts of the states, you're not even allowed certain kinds of glassware, lest it be used for making drugs!
Where I live, you can buy any kind of glassware you want, but it's all cash-only because that way they don't have to do any sort of record-keeping or reporting, since they "can't" verify identities on cash-only sales. I have no doubt that a law will be passed to close this loophole, but in the meantime, nobody involved is complaining.
My granddad had one of those. I used to like to divide large numbers by 7. It would clank and chug and calculate so much that *smoke* would start coming out of it. How cool is THAT? And then he stopped me using it because he kept having to get it fixed.
I'm going to have to get this book. I'm one of those people midway between clueless AOL users and people who actually know what they're doing: I run all linux but don't actually know how to configure ipchains or the like. So I have an old (fanless 486) headless IPCop box downstairs, acting as a firewall and NAT. I got it set up and it's been running for six years, doing what I wanted, without me having to deal with it at all. Nobody (to the best of my knowledge) has ever gotten through it, and I do check the logs it generates on a weekly basis. It's been an enormous help: I don't have to set up DHCP, NAT, or a firewall, or figure out how to get a server and a couple desktops all connected without exposing myself to risks I don't understand. I'm nothing like a computer professional, I'm a lousy programmer, I don't understand most of the IT stuff I read on slashdot. IPCop isn't pretty, but it chugs along and does what I need. And, since I don't know what I'm doing, I can't figure out how to configure it to let traffic for SecondLife through, so I can't start playing SecondLife. Win-win situation!
I'm not saying this is *always* or even often the case, but there are many people for whom it is, indeed, hidden in a mattress: if you spend $20 mil on a Picasso, and then let it sit in your gallery for 20 years, and then resell it for $60M, during that time, you had something worth a lot of money that did precisely nothing for anyone else. There are a lot of people who invest in tangible items that accumulate value without any associated income or dividends. I just read a paper on this, but damned if I can find a link to it...
I worked in a scary manufacturing/research environment for a while: we had *lots* of big fluorine lasers. There were two alarms: fire, and fluorine. When the fire alarm went off, people sat around for a moment, looked at each other, waggled eyebrows, looked around some more, then moseyed over to one of the windows on the manufacturing floor to see if there were visible flames, and then slowly, reluctantly, walked over to the door and went outside. When the fluorine alarm went off, people dropped everything and ran as fast as they could. We were required to have our desks or workspaces "within the distance of one breath" of the nearest door, and that was a lot less than fifteen seconds. Sure, you *can* hold your breath for that long if you have warning, but if you just exhaled and the alarm went off... not so great.
(Fluorine, by the way, smells a little like elmer's glue, in my opinion.)
Anyway, I know this isn't practical for enormous skyscrapers, but if you design a single-story building and lay out the production/workspace areas with a little care, I think it's perfectly possible to have the building cleared in fifteen seconds.
Slashdot Mirror
That's likely -- but the stuff in the background, even in the lecture room, was all not just physics, but laser physics: stuff you see in second-semester physical chemistry, three and four state metastability diagrams, stuff like that. Even at CalTech, that's probably on less than 5% of the blackboards at any given time.
Then there's the awful plot. Sigh. I had such hopes...
But a lot of it is subconscious.
Google "human ovulation smell" or scent or whatever. (That should be relatively worksafe, as opposed to, say "sniffing panties" which is how the original research was done, AFAIK.)
Here's a recent article about how men can tell when women are ovulating.
Here's a lit review from 2001, discussing just how good humans are at detecting pheromones, unconsciously.
(I can't help but wonder what 'subconscious' means in this sense: if you smell vomit and want desperately to leave the airplane, is that subconscious? is a dog smelling my hamburger and coming over to say hi subconscious? there are lots of areas where behavior is affected by things that a person might not be fully aware of, but if asked might be able to remember -- is that conscious? For instance, when I'm riding my bike down the path and see someone walking along talking to nobody, is it a crazy person or is it a person that's talking on a cellphone? I mostly determine that by some intuitive sense about how the person is moving: lurching around, uncoordinated movement -- but I don't *think* about it. I just know. But afterwards, I have a conscious realization: that person {is|isn't} crazy. Read "Blink" by Malcolm Gladwell for more about that.)
Anyway, there have been studies done since the '70's, IIRC, exploring how good humans are at smelling things: slow, but still very good.
Yeah, but then they advise you to cancel Phase 2, and you *don't* cancel Phase 2, and all hell breaks loose and next thing you know, crazed physicists are clamping electrodes to their tongues and the world's about to get nuked.
You wanna roll those dice?
>Not only did Buckaroo's car go wicked fast
Yeah, but one heat-seeking missile and he's *history*.
As an ex-laser-freak, I note that the physics and math in the background of "Real Genius" -- the stuff written on chalkboards and equipment on the benches -- was all good science. It was just the stuff in the foreground that sucked. I think that's often the case with movies intended for the camp/dork crowd, that they get people with some experience in the subject to at least try and prop it up.
One of the things I found most charming about BB (which might be my favorite movie) was precisely the sense of time: how the Professor and Emilio Lizardo were using an electric trolley controlled by knife switches to get to the required velocity, BB was using a Ford F-series pickup with a jet, and the Black Lectroids had a full-on starship, all to do the same thing. I also loved the set design in the Black Lectroid starship, with cryrogenic fluids flowing through channels grown in the walls. That would've been a fun movie to work on.
The script for the sequel (BB against the world crime league) exists, but it's really hard to get your hands on, and is kind of disappointing. I still hope it'll happen.
Based on my own experience, and those of friends who would rather pay $$ for instrument flightsim training rather than $$$ for actual training (for getting your instrument rating, you're already allowed to use some flight sims for accredited training) flightsims are incredibly useful. Even MS Flightsim does a fantastic job of getting you used to using the equipment (*if* they have it simulated: this isn't going to teach you how to use a Garmin 530, frinstance.) You get a feel for technique and can get great at translating radio calls into establishing holding patterns and stuff like that. Even with tricky stuff, like flying ground-reference maneuvers with a strong crosswind, flightsims are an amazing help.
And then you go to land in a real plane, having spent many hours in flightsims, and boy does it show. My instructor said I flew like a professional pilot with 500 hours of time until that last thirty seconds on final, when I flew like I'd just solo'ed. (Well, I *had*, basically.)
The point being: if you use a training aid it could mask real-world inadequacy, and a falsely confident pilot rarely lives to figure out what went hideously awry.
With all that said, if it's the copilot learning this way and the pilot's the PIC on final, or has quick access to the controls, it's probably a great idea, and it's sure way cheaper and way less risk on students (at any level) and their instructors.
Oh, geez, I'm sure you're right: I was just thinking about wheaties. It's been too long since I've played with coins (other than very destructively.)
They were steel in '43, and the so-called shell-casing bronze in '44-'45, and the more standard bronze the rest of the run until 1982.
By the way, if you stack some pre-'81 pennies alternating with post-'82 pennies and heat the whole mass over a bunsen burner, when the zinc melts the whole works fuses with a blue flash and you can pry big pretty pieces of brass out of the mass. It works much better if you melt the old ones, then drop the new ones into the melt, because the zinc dissolves before oxidizing, but it takes *quite* a burner to melt a bunch of copper.
(you probably already know) Half-dollars were still 40% silver until 1967. I used to make a reasonable amount of money buying $20 of halves, sorting out the 40% silver ones, and reselling them for their silver value, which was greater than their face value.
Melting down coins for their metal value has been going on for 100 years. It was especially bad before the US government let gold and silver prices rise to market values because within the US, it wasn't worth melting them, but if you exported them you could make an enormous amount of money, since the market value of gold and silver was 5x what the controlled value was in the US. I think the US stopped that in the late '60's?
She thinks the word 'Christian' means 'one who lives like Christ' -- which, of course, is exactly what it does mean. She doesn't think that 'Christian' means you have to believe that women aren't allowed to speak in church, or that men aren't allowed to cut their hair, or that there is a discrete location called Heaven, all of which she thinks are parts of the Bible that are the words of the writers, rather than the word of God. Her church generally feels that the most basic tenet of Christianity is "love your neighbor as yourself." (Mark 12:28-31.) Which, of course, is exactly what the most basic tenet of Christianity is, since that's what Jesus said it was.
There are many, many people who agree with your philosophy. It pretty much is exactly what I believe, and most of my family. They're very active in a local Baptist church, where most of the members also believe something similar. My mom teaches Sunday School and has told kids that she doesn't really believe in Heaven, that for her 'everlasting life' is the good memories people have of you after you die, based on the generous things you've done for other people, and while other church members might argue with her, they think it's good she's teaching.
So, there are already churches working along the lines you're talking about.
There are problems with this approach, though: basically, people who go down this route aren't anywhere nearly as enthusiastic/desperate/avid as people who hew to the evangelical ideology, so the churches tend to be less active, have lower attendance, and so forth. Coz, basically, it's a smooth glide from there to some flavor of weak atheism.
Anyway, I think you're on the right track, for what it's worth, and I'd go to your church.
And, unfortunately, there are hundreds of other writers who *aren't* asking that, like Annie Proulx, and hundreds more who are *trying* to sound like that. (They should be found, and shot.)
(I *like* Proulx, by the way...)
>Companies don't normally kill off profitable products and services, not even evil/stupid corporations.
I'd have to disagree with that. I've watched three large companies for whom I've worked -- all Fortune 500 companies -- kill off profitable products and services that were not as profitable as they wanted. The company I'm working for right now sold off three business units because they didn't have a profit margin above 30%. We're only keeping the parts of the company that can beat 30%: if you don't, you're out the door. There are probably a lot of fields where companies can't afford to throw away marginal profit, but there are plenty of fields where it's not worth chasing chump change when there's a 50% profit margin to be hunted down and seized.
If that's the case, it's quite possible another, smaller and more agile, company could live very comfortably on the profits from this discard.
I haven't done the calculations, but I've read from a reasonably reputable source, New Scientist, that the Antarctic contains enough water to raise the world's oceans 75 meters. I suspect at some temperature, thermal expansion of the ocean would be greater than 75 meters, but I'm guessing, from other stuff I've read, that it'd take more heat to do that, than to melt the Antarctic. In other words, for a small worldwide increase in temp, I think the melting Antarctic would be the dominant effect.
Of course, it's trickier than that, because the ice of the Antarctic itself would expand as it heated. (Well, first it shrinks a little, to 4C, but after THAT...)
However, nobody seems to anticipate the Antarctic melting, or at least not the much larger Eastern portion.
It's not that MarketWatch is contemplating their own navel: it's that they're speaking to their audience. Their audience is heavily invested in a set of business practices in which short-term profit is the definition of success. Any business practice that operates outside that definition cannot, in their minds, be a success, of course, so they question it. The underlying idea -- which they share with any evangelical group -- is that you must try to convince people that what you're doing is the only good way, and other ways must somehow be wrong, for fear they will encroach on your territory.
MarketWatch writes to reassure its readers that they've made the right choices, knowing that reassured readers will come back for more.
>I'm old enough to remember when a steering wheel was just a steering wheel...
I bring you the steering wheel of the 1958 Edsel, which featured the Teletouch shifting system, available starting in 1956. And we all know how well the Edsel did.
TOO much simplicity bad. But there's a reason we like hierarchical storage, menu systems, and information organization in general: the more options, the longer it takes to find what you're looking for.
These two writers desperately need to read "The Paradox Of Choice" by Barry Schwartz. He argues persuasively that more choice leads to more frustration and more long-term dissatisfaction with the choices that have been made.
I agree with your point, but I think you're missing the larger picture. It's not that The Daily Show is a joke, and that makes relying on it as a primary information source stupid. It's that many people feel it's no more stupid to rely on The Daily Show than Fox News, or maybe even CNN, and the people who think this way are generally better-informed than the people who watch FN or CNN.
It's a little like the linux/windows security debate: the people who use linux and say it's more secure are the sorts of people who, if they were using windows, wouldn't do the sorts of things that make windows vulnerable.
People can derive good or bad information from most sources. Right now, the sort of people who can derive good information, are watching The Daily Show.
:)
(my point being, that CS people and the users of their technology, have avidly adopted acronymization -- probably even more than the military (who are infamous for their usage.) In either case, it's the beginnings of a new dialect, optimized to convey the information that's important to them.)
I rotflmao rtf pp! lol! hth hand!
>Hell, in some parts of the states, you're not even allowed certain kinds of glassware, lest it be used for making drugs!
Where I live, you can buy any kind of glassware you want, but it's all cash-only because that way they don't have to do any sort of record-keeping or reporting, since they "can't" verify identities on cash-only sales. I have no doubt that a law will be passed to close this loophole, but in the meantime, nobody involved is complaining.
My granddad had one of those.
I used to like to divide large numbers by 7. It would clank and chug and calculate so much that *smoke* would start coming out of it. How cool is THAT?
And then he stopped me using it because he kept having to get it fixed.
>The hang wringing has generated a couple of new ideas to deal with the dilemma.
Don't wring your hang in public.
They'll arrest you.
I'm going to have to get this book.
I'm one of those people midway between clueless AOL users and people who actually know what they're doing: I run all linux but don't actually know how to configure ipchains or the like. So I have an old (fanless 486) headless IPCop box downstairs, acting as a firewall and NAT. I got it set up and it's been running for six years, doing what I wanted, without me having to deal with it at all. Nobody (to the best of my knowledge) has ever gotten through it, and I do check the logs it generates on a weekly basis. It's been an enormous help: I don't have to set up DHCP, NAT, or a firewall, or figure out how to get a server and a couple desktops all connected without exposing myself to risks I don't understand. I'm nothing like a computer professional, I'm a lousy programmer, I don't understand most of the IT stuff I read on slashdot. IPCop isn't pretty, but it chugs along and does what I need. And, since I don't know what I'm doing, I can't figure out how to configure it to let traffic for SecondLife through, so I can't start playing SecondLife. Win-win situation!
I'm not saying this is *always* or even often the case, but there are many people for whom it is, indeed, hidden in a mattress: if you spend $20 mil on a Picasso, and then let it sit in your gallery for 20 years, and then resell it for $60M, during that time, you had something worth a lot of money that did precisely nothing for anyone else. There are a lot of people who invest in tangible items that accumulate value without any associated income or dividends.
I just read a paper on this, but damned if I can find a link to it...
I worked in a scary manufacturing/research environment for a while: we had *lots* of big fluorine lasers. There were two alarms: fire, and fluorine. When the fire alarm went off, people sat around for a moment, looked at each other, waggled eyebrows, looked around some more, then moseyed over to one of the windows on the manufacturing floor to see if there were visible flames, and then slowly, reluctantly, walked over to the door and went outside. When the fluorine alarm went off, people dropped everything and ran as fast as they could. We were required to have our desks or workspaces "within the distance of one breath" of the nearest door, and that was a lot less than fifteen seconds. Sure, you *can* hold your breath for that long if you have warning, but if you just exhaled and the alarm went off... not so great.
(Fluorine, by the way, smells a little like elmer's glue, in my opinion.)
Anyway, I know this isn't practical for enormous skyscrapers, but if you design a single-story building and lay out the production/workspace areas with a little care, I think it's perfectly possible to have the building cleared in fifteen seconds.