Having just come in from observing the comet with binoculars, I'd like to disagree with the above posters. It is very easy to safely use binoculars close to the sun. I, for example, was sitting on the ground with the sun blocked by a wall. The only way I could have seen the sun was to very purposefully tilt my torso to the left while turning my neck right. It took me about 3 minutes to find the comet unaided and during that time the sun never came into view, thus I was very confidant that I would do no damage to myself with the binoculars.
Thinking of Star Trek, problem number 2. Time Travelers Can Use Current Designs, reminds me of Star Trek IV. Scotty tries to talk to a Mac, giving it the formula for transparent aluminum. Realizing it wasn't working he picks up the mouse and tries talking into it. Fortunately for the plot, he was able to enter it with the keyboard in about 3 seconds.
Actually on the NuBus 68K macs there were two pieces of software, neither of which executed on board the card. There was an on card driver, which was loaded into the system at boot time, and quicktime acceleration patches that resided on disk as an extension. The driver performed such functions as initializing the card, changing resolutions, gamma correction, and providing the address of the framebuffer for drawing directly to graphic memory (which is how quickdraw rendered). The quicktime patches were not required to use the card so you could just plug and play.
To update the acceleration features you just replaced the extension file. The first thing the drivers I worked on did upon loading from ROM was to check the card's EPROM for a valid driver and if found replaced itself with it.
Thanks for the nostalgic flashback, I remember reading that as a kid back in the mid 70's. Its amazing to think how well they conveyed the message as I got it and was around 10 at the time.
If I'm not mistaken, the example of the moths in England has since been proven to be false, in that it didn't actually happen and that bad scientific method was involved in collecting data. I cannot currently offer citations for this, but I can offer a suggestion that your (one) example of observable Survival Of The Fittest may need to be further investigated before being used in debates such as this.
This isn't the kind of problem solving that even most math-team alumni have any experience with. Zilliant's chief scientist, Ahmet Kuyumcu, sent along a couple of algorithms of the sort that Zilliant uses. Here's one: Pwin( R )=NfN x P( R )N.
As a "math-team alumni" I can say that this is a pretty trivial equation!
I just cut and paste from Safari to NeoOffice 2.1 and links were preserved.
Having just come in from observing the comet with binoculars, I'd like to disagree with the above posters. It is very easy to safely use binoculars close to the sun. I, for example, was sitting on the ground with the sun blocked by a wall. The only way I could have seen the sun was to very purposefully tilt my torso to the left while turning my neck right. It took me about 3 minutes to find the comet unaided and during that time the sun never came into view, thus I was very confidant that I would do no damage to myself with the binoculars.
Thinking of Star Trek, problem number 2. Time Travelers Can Use Current Designs, reminds me of Star Trek IV. Scotty tries to talk to a Mac, giving it the formula for transparent aluminum. Realizing it wasn't working he picks up the mouse and tries talking into it. Fortunately for the plot, he was able to enter it with the keyboard in about 3 seconds.
Actually on the NuBus 68K macs there were two pieces of software, neither of which executed on board the card. There was an on card driver, which was loaded into the system at boot time, and quicktime acceleration patches that resided on disk as an extension. The driver performed such functions as initializing the card, changing resolutions, gamma correction, and providing the address of the framebuffer for drawing directly to graphic memory (which is how quickdraw rendered). The quicktime patches were not required to use the card so you could just plug and play.
To update the acceleration features you just replaced the extension file. The first thing the drivers I worked on did upon loading from ROM was to check the card's EPROM for a valid driver and if found replaced itself with it.
Thanks for the nostalgic flashback, I remember reading that as a kid back in the mid 70's. Its amazing to think how well they conveyed the message as I got it and was around 10 at the time.
If I'm not mistaken, the example of the moths in England has since been proven to be false, in that it didn't actually happen and that bad scientific method was involved in collecting data. I cannot currently offer citations for this, but I can offer a suggestion that your (one) example of observable Survival Of The Fittest may need to be further investigated before being used in debates such as this.
# moths
Actually, you've been hoodwinked by yet another creationist lie, see http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/wells/iconob.html
From the article:
This isn't the kind of problem solving that even most math-team alumni have any experience with. Zilliant's chief scientist, Ahmet Kuyumcu, sent along a couple of algorithms of the sort that Zilliant uses. Here's one: Pwin( R )=NfN x P( R )N.
As a "math-team alumni" I can say that this is a pretty trivial equation!