The moderators aren't usually morons, though. It just takes one with bad motivation. Many, many people's salaries depend on serving the criminal interests that we're pointing out. They have to make themselves believe that they are right - that its "defense" and "industry" not war, murder, fascism, corruption, theft, treason, crimes against peace and humanity - or they couldn't live with themselves and their collusion with evil.
They have developed some psychological defenses against those sorts of realizations. But when we point out to these vicious vermin who consider themselves capitalists and patriots that they are also destroying the almighty GDP of the United States, now that gets through their defenses and pricks their delusions of self-worth.
It's even worse when you look at the proportion of engineering talent and investment diverted to destructive military and other classified purposes. It's not even like eating the seed corn, it's more like feeding it to vicious plague-infested rats.
The numbers don't add up - IIRC, the pessimistic (Lancet) figures are about 600,000 dead from violence, many more if you compare the pre-Gulf War I death rates with today - lots of deaths from bad water, especially among young children. The UN estimates over 500,000 Iraqi children under 5 died under sanctions beyond the pre-war mortality rates. AFAIK child mortality has not fallen much since, certainly not to pre-Gulf War I levels.
The US annual auto crash fatalities used to be around 40,000-50,000 last time I looked, so that's at most 300,000 since the start of Gulf War II.
Of course the US has a much larger population than Iraq, so even if the numbers of deaths were equal, -and they aren't even close- the death rates would be proportionally much higher in Iraq.
Neither the proportion of US GDP spent on war nor the number of US auto fatalities are a good measure of the harm to the people of Iraq.
N. Korea tried to nuke the US? They have crude nukes and medium-range missiles, and they're unpredictable and dangerous, but I never heard of an attempt to nuke the US.
No, the refractive index does depend on the frequency for dispersive media, which are effectively all real media. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dispersion_(optics) and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Refractive_index . Different frequencies have different phase velocities in a given dispersive medium and thus different refractive indices (see chart in "refractive index" link)
Also you can't do the calculation you describe for different frequencies unless you take into account the Abbe number of the material.
The site processing.org has a beautiful gallery of projects, all with very little coding. In fact, all the most impressive simple demos I have seen in the past decade were written in Processing.
Agreed. Also processing (aka proce55ing for Google searches) produces beautiful animations and advanced interfaces effortlessly while keeping the code spare and elegant. The Java cruft has been exorcised. No other language even comes close - this is the one kids will want to work with.
"...every Democrat voted to restore it, every Republican voted to keep it suspended" Your link shows that this is false.
Hagel (R-NE) Lugar (R-IN) Smith (R-OR) Snowe (R-ME) Specter (R-PA) Sununu (R-NH) voted for restoring habeas corpus.
On the other hand the following senators voted against the constitution despite the example of their fellow senator of (supposedly) the same party and state:
Lieberman (ID-CT) (former Dem., lost primary) Collins (R-ME) Gregg (R-NH)
Good paper - it also says that by using mixed precision (iterated 32-bit math for rough matrix factorization then fine-tuning the precision in 64-bit) the double-precision matrix performance is up to 155 Gflops.
I agree with everything you said except this part:
"A multiple choice question might only have one right answer and its point value is the exact same as that of something much easier (especially, when on the harder on, the wrong choice might even be 'righter' than the correct choice on the easy question) -- but thats why there is an entire field of psychometrics out there to ensure that these sorts of exams are doing what they say they are."
Seems to me like that is more an example of psychometricians being forced to accept a less than valid form of test scoring. The proper way to do things has to incorporate Rasch's principle that the likelihood that a given test-taker will give the correct answer (on a question that is valid for the quantity it being used to measure) depends on the product of the easiness of the question and the ability of the test-taker. For that matter, lumped scores (pass-fail, ranking, or absolute) on professional proficiency exams - which by their nature must test disparate quantities with various non-linear contributions to professional qualification - cannot properly be interpreted as measurements of anything without a well-thought out unified criterion that describes the contributions and dependencies of the various quantities measured by the questions to the overall measurement of professional competence.
I hope you can understand that no-one else in the world shares even your minimal believe in the US government?
That's an undersrtatement. For me, this ploy just means I can add "router-rooting" to my existing list of: "retard-raping rump-humping rabid-rover-rogering right-wing runt-reamers", but perhaps even highly-hyphenated alliteritive invective can be excessive? That's one perspective, but the objective will reject it.
Right now, our laws are a series of patches upon patches. ("Law cruft"?)
Not only that, but the memory (stare decisis) and application logic (judicial interpretation) have gotten completely corrupted. We need to do a clean reboot - you can't expect even the best program (law) to run on a crashed system.
Thanks for the link. In Atlanta the place to go for consumer electronics is BrandSmart, a huge red, white and blue store just SW of the I-285 / Buford Hwy. intersection, (i.e. the northernmost part of Atlanta's perimeter highway). They have prices that are usually below the "cost" price that chains such as Circuit City give their own employees - but when BrandSmart has a sale, the advertised items are often 75-85% off regular prices at the major chains.
Online only: Science teachers, hobbyists, prototypers and other technogy-lusting types can find what they need at Kelvin.
Alltronics is another great site but more specifically focused on electronic components and surplus.
Good comment - ~4kV on the caps makes it a lot easier.
I'm not really sure why the Slashdot article links to the Wikipedia "Supercapacitor" article - that hasn't had anything useful on EEStor since July 26, when this section with all the important claimed numbers for EEStor's capacitor was removed:
"As of spring 2006, EEStor Inc. claims to have a supercapacitor with a barium titanate dielectric nearing production. The company claims a unit with 31 farads capacitance and an operating voltage of 3.5 kV, capable of storing up to 340 Wh/kg (1232 kJ/kg)and charging or discharging at up to 3.5 kW/kg (52 kWh = 187 MJ and 520 kW - 6 minute charging time - for the 152 kg unit), lifetime of over 1,000,000 discharge cycles and leakage of less than 0.1% per month [[4] US Patent 7,033,406] with a cost of $40-$60 per kWh ($3,200 - $2,100 per unit). [BusinessWeek, 3 September 2005]. The technology is scheduled for third-party verification during the summer of 2006."
So the charge rate on a car-size capacitor is 520 kW at 3.5 kV which means the current is a bit under 150 amps. According to American Wire Gauge (AWG) Current limits the necessary diameter for each wire of the pair is between 0.25 - 0.33 inches (5.83 mm - 8.25 mm) depending on the wire length.
The solution to the high peak power demands of an electrical "filling" station is to have a large (MWh -class) Ultracapacitor bank at the station to level the load over the course of a day.
The car range estimate also seems reasonable - the relevant figure is not the full-cycle efficiency (which includes charging losses), but the efficiency based on the energy actually stored in the capacitor. The EV1 had an efficiency on that basis of about 0.18 kWh per mile, so even without adjusting for the lower weight and losses of the capacitor compared to the EV1's batteries, a 52kWh capacitor should have a range of about 290 miles.
***
I think he most interesting things about the EEStor capacitor are not just the energy and power densities but the amazing durability and low cost. If it works as advertised this is going to allow lots of businesses that aren't practical today such as solar, wind, and tide generation far from the grid - with energy shipped out in boxes. Utilities could use these for load-levelling. With the right setup in the cars, the vast number of cars hooked up to the grid and any given time could itself be the utilities' supply buffer.
Students own their work and need not cite themselves, no matter what the school says. "Self-plagarism" is an oxymoron.
The purpose of graded work is to assess knowledge and ability. Requiring students to jump through hoops to demonstrate over and over that they know what they ought to know and can do what they should be able to do is the kind of petty, nonsensical tyrany that only encourages burnout. I say that if one has knowledge and ability equivalent to someone who has taken a given course, then one is entitled to credit for that course whether one has taken it or not, and one is justified in breaking unilaterally-imposed "rules" to get that credit recognized with as little effort as possible.
For more moderately gifted people such as yourself a "token measure of responsibility and seriousness" may be sufficient, but for those who are as far beyond you as you are beyond an average five year-old*, school is often torture - worse than merely a waste of time, it's a continuous effort to destroy knowledge, reason, curiosity, and the spirit itself. It's the worst sort of child abuse, and it leaves permanent scars.
*Such people exist. On the Rasch measure (a provably equal-interval and arguably ratio scale) Stanford-Binet V change-sensitive score (CSS), the top score in the norming group was as far beyond an avarage person as the avarage adult score is beyond a less than three year-old child's. (See "Use of the SB5 in the Assessment of High Abilities" Riverside Publishing Assessment Service Bulletin Number 3 by Deborah Ruf)
I recommend Excelsior College- (excelsior.edu). They are cheap, accredited, online and they give credit for a huge number of different tests. The most credit comes from taking the GRE subject exams - if you score in the top 20% you get 30 semester hours of credit - 1 full year, enough to fulfill the requrements of majors that don't requre lab work. They'll also transfer credits from any accredited source and drop any records you don't want.
Also check out hoagiesgifted.org for vast high-quality resources on dealing with the difficulties of being gifted, especially schools' insanity. Reading the TAGFAM, TAGMAX and TAGPDQ mailing lists (esp. the archives of the first two) will make you feel a lot less alone. (Just be sure to sign up for digest mode- high traffic.)
"...the standard deviation is quite often different... "
If it's any reputable IQ test, (other than perhaps the Catell, IIRC) the s.d. is 15. The Stanford-Binet used to use 16, but has not for the last two revisions. The Mensa test used to (any may still) use some large s.d. to make people feel smarter and thus more likely to sign up. But aside from essentially fraudulent types of tests, the s.d. is 15, and thus one can calculate the equivalent percentage, at least for for normal IQs (~65 - ~135).
In reality the normal distribution does not match the ability distribution at the high end. There are more high scorers than one would expect- the distribution is more like log-normal. The reliability/repeatability of high scores is also very low due to ceiling effects, imperfect test correlation, different tests' questions having different sub-factor loadings, and having different degrees of norming quality in the high range. These are the more frequently important reasons one needs to know the tests and the forms before even trying to roughly figure out what a given score means. Sometimes one comes across jumbo deviation size, but I believe most people working with IQ look at such puffed-up numbers almost as fake scores.
~...but on the list of websites for which this entity is culpable, there is one that is a little different, one that sticks out - sticks out its toungue for tasty BBQ bugs, in fact: [trumpet fanfare] The Toad Club of America!!!!
From:
In this, my first post to this august body, I don't want to be though of as braggart. But, if it is the truth it is not bragging. In my yard I have the largest and fattest collection of California Toads in the world. Since this is called an information exchange list, I feel obligated to share my secrets of success with all.
It started with one fine toad which spent an entire summer sitting under my bug light gorging itself on Bar-B-Qued bugs. By late August it was so fat its legs could hardly touch the ground. It looked much like a light colored cow pie. Then the El Nino year came with lots of rain and standing water and Toad (I selected a unique name for it) found a fertile mate. I wish I could tell you that I had a hand in selecting the mate because the breeding was so successful....
So we should be tolerant of other people's support for torture, wars of aggression and the gutting of the Constitution? Bush fascists are entitled to their opinions and their votes, but democracy can in no way make them right, legitimate, or diminish their personal ethical responsibilities for the crimes they have abetted. One need not hate Bush's unwitting dupes, but certainly one cannot respect them; as an American one must hate what they believe and what they are doing to this country. The real, knowing participants in Bush's crimes on the other hand, must not be shown mercy on account of their large numbers, prominent positions or the fact that they subverted the whole US Gaovernment rather than some smaller crime. Insofar as one loves this country or peace or freedom, such knowing participants in Bush's crimes must be hated or despised.
Anyone supporting Bush after the revelations about his war crimes, election fraud and attacks on constitutional and human rights is an enemy of America and the freedoms of Americans. Tangible support of Bush's crimes by an American meets the constitutional definition of treason.
Slashdot Mirror
http://tech.slashdot.org/tech/08/08/06/0043220.shtml
Hmm... I just got modded down too.
The moderators aren't usually morons, though. It just takes one with bad motivation. Many, many people's salaries depend on serving the criminal interests that we're pointing out. They have to make themselves believe that they are right - that its "defense" and "industry" not war, murder, fascism, corruption, theft, treason, crimes against peace and humanity - or they couldn't live with themselves and their collusion with evil.
They have developed some psychological defenses against those sorts of realizations. But when we point out to these vicious vermin who consider themselves capitalists and patriots that they are also destroying the almighty GDP of the United States, now that gets through their defenses and pricks their delusions of self-worth.
It's even worse when you look at the proportion of engineering talent and investment diverted to destructive military and other classified purposes. It's not even like eating the seed corn, it's more like feeding it to vicious plague-infested rats.
The numbers don't add up - IIRC, the pessimistic (Lancet) figures are about 600,000 dead from violence, many more if you compare the pre-Gulf War I death rates with today - lots of deaths from bad water, especially among young children. The UN estimates over 500,000 Iraqi children under 5 died under sanctions beyond the pre-war mortality rates. AFAIK child mortality has not fallen much since, certainly not to pre-Gulf War I levels.
The US annual auto crash fatalities used to be around 40,000-50,000 last time I looked, so that's at most 300,000 since the start of Gulf War II.
Of course the US has a much larger population than Iraq, so even if the numbers of deaths were equal, -and they aren't even close- the death rates would be proportionally much higher in Iraq.
Neither the proportion of US GDP spent on war nor the number of US auto fatalities are a good measure of the harm to the people of Iraq.
N. Korea tried to nuke the US? They have crude nukes and medium-range missiles, and they're unpredictable and dangerous, but I never heard of an attempt to nuke the US.
No, the refractive index does depend on the frequency for dispersive media, which are effectively all real media. See
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dispersion_(optics) and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Refractive_index . Different frequencies have different phase velocities in a given dispersive medium and thus different refractive indices (see chart in "refractive index" link)
Also you can't do the calculation you describe for different frequencies unless you take into account the Abbe number of the material.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abbe_number .
The site processing.org has a beautiful gallery of projects, all with very little coding. In fact, all the most impressive simple demos I have seen in the past decade were written in Processing.
Agreed. Also processing (aka proce55ing for Google searches) produces beautiful animations and advanced interfaces effortlessly while keeping the code spare and elegant. The Java cruft has been exorcised. No other language even comes close - this is the one kids will want to work with.
My first thought on reading that was "Wow - Dijkstra is on Slashdot?!"
My second thought was that Dijkstra has a rather high Slashdot ID, considering - still impressive to be posting, being dead and all.
Sorry, God / Mangu.
My third thought is: "I'm /still/ pissed that GOTO is considered harmful."
check again - the answer is 42
-10 + 50 + 1 + 1 = XLII
"...every Democrat voted to restore it, every Republican voted to keep it suspended"
Your link shows that this is false.
Hagel (R-NE)
Lugar (R-IN)
Smith (R-OR)
Snowe (R-ME)
Specter (R-PA)
Sununu (R-NH)
voted for restoring habeas corpus.
On the other hand the following senators voted against the constitution despite the example of their fellow senator of (supposedly) the same party and state:
Lieberman (ID-CT) (former Dem., lost primary)
Collins (R-ME)
Gregg (R-NH)
Good paper - it also says that by using mixed precision (iterated 32-bit math for rough matrix factorization then fine-tuning the precision in 64-bit) the double-precision matrix performance is up to 155 Gflops.
I agree with everything you said except this part:
"A multiple choice question might only have one right answer and its point value is the exact same as that of something much easier (especially, when on the harder on, the wrong choice might even be 'righter' than the correct choice on the easy question) -- but thats why there is an entire field of psychometrics out there to ensure that these sorts of exams are doing what they say they are."
Seems to me like that is more an example of psychometricians being forced to accept a less than valid form of test scoring. The proper way to do things has to incorporate Rasch's principle that the likelihood that a given test-taker will give the correct answer (on a question that is valid for the quantity it being used to measure) depends on the product of the easiness of the question and the ability of the test-taker. For that matter, lumped scores (pass-fail, ranking, or absolute) on professional proficiency exams - which by their nature must test disparate quantities with various non-linear contributions to professional qualification - cannot properly be interpreted as measurements of anything without a well-thought out unified criterion that describes the contributions and dependencies of the various quantities measured by the questions to the overall measurement of professional competence.
That's an undersrtatement. For me, this ploy just means I can add "router-rooting" to my existing list of: "retard-raping rump-humping rabid-rover-rogering right-wing runt-reamers", but perhaps even highly-hyphenated alliteritive invective can be excessive? That's one perspective, but the objective will reject it.
Not only that, but the memory (stare decisis) and application logic (judicial interpretation) have gotten completely corrupted. We need to do a clean reboot - you can't expect even the best program (law) to run on a crashed system.
Thanks for the link. In Atlanta the place to go for consumer electronics is BrandSmart, a huge red, white and blue store just SW of the I-285 / Buford Hwy. intersection, (i.e. the northernmost part of Atlanta's perimeter highway). They have prices that are usually below the "cost" price that chains such as Circuit City give their own employees - but when BrandSmart has a sale, the advertised items are often 75-85% off regular prices at the major chains.
Online only:
Science teachers, hobbyists, prototypers and other technogy-lusting types can find what they need at Kelvin.
Alltronics is another great site but more specifically focused on electronic components and surplus.
Well at least that's better than the classic British response: "There's no demand".
"12) Hot grits..."
in light of this comment on the linked article's page:
(throwing away my fresh mod points on this enlightening article's comments)
Good comment - ~4kV on the caps makes it a lot easier.
I'm not really sure why the Slashdot article links to the Wikipedia "Supercapacitor" article - that hasn't had anything useful on EEStor since July 26, when this section with all the important claimed numbers for EEStor's capacitor was removed:
"As of spring 2006, EEStor Inc. claims to have a supercapacitor with a barium titanate dielectric nearing production. The company claims a unit with 31 farads capacitance and an operating voltage of 3.5 kV, capable of storing up to 340 Wh/kg (1232 kJ/kg)and charging or discharging at up to 3.5 kW/kg (52 kWh = 187 MJ and 520 kW - 6 minute charging time - for the 152 kg unit), lifetime of over 1,000,000 discharge cycles and leakage of less than 0.1% per month [[4] US Patent 7,033,406] with a cost of $40-$60 per kWh ($3,200 - $2,100 per unit). [BusinessWeek, 3 September 2005]. The technology is scheduled for third-party verification during the summer of 2006."
(This had links to Barium Titanate Ultra-Capacitor (Richard WEIR / Carl NELSON). That page seems to include copies of essentially all the professional articles on EEStor.)
So the charge rate on a car-size capacitor is 520 kW at 3.5 kV which means the current is a bit under 150 amps. According to American Wire Gauge (AWG) Current limits the necessary diameter for each wire of the pair is between 0.25 - 0.33 inches (5.83 mm - 8.25 mm) depending on the wire length.
The solution to the high peak power demands of an electrical "filling" station is to have a large (MWh -class) Ultracapacitor bank at the station to level the load over the course of a day.
The car range estimate also seems reasonable - the relevant figure is not the full-cycle efficiency (which includes charging losses), but the efficiency based on the energy actually stored in the capacitor. The EV1 had an efficiency on that basis of about 0.18 kWh per mile, so even without adjusting for the lower weight and losses of the capacitor compared to the EV1's batteries, a 52kWh capacitor should have a range of about 290 miles.
***
I think he most interesting things about the EEStor capacitor are not just the energy and power densities but the amazing durability and low cost. If it works as advertised this is going to allow lots of businesses that aren't
practical today such as solar, wind, and tide generation far from the grid - with energy shipped out in boxes. Utilities could use these for load-levelling. With the right setup in the cars, the vast number of cars hooked up to the grid and any given time could itself be the utilities' supply buffer.
Students own their work and need not cite themselves, no matter what the school says. "Self-plagarism" is an oxymoron.
The purpose of graded work is to assess knowledge and ability. Requiring students to jump through hoops to demonstrate over and over that they know what they ought to know and can do what they should be able to do is the kind of petty, nonsensical tyrany that only encourages burnout. I say that if one has knowledge and ability equivalent to someone who has taken a given course, then one is entitled to credit for that course whether one has taken it or not, and one is justified in breaking unilaterally-imposed "rules" to get that credit recognized with as little effort as possible.
For more moderately gifted people such as yourself a "token measure of responsibility and seriousness" may be sufficient, but for those who are as far beyond you as you are beyond an average five year-old*, school is often torture - worse than merely a waste of time, it's a continuous effort to destroy knowledge, reason, curiosity, and the spirit itself. It's the worst sort of child abuse, and it leaves permanent scars.
For deeper looks into what's behind "gifted underachievement" look at some of the articles at http://hoagiesgifted.org/underachiever.htm
*Such people exist. On the Rasch measure (a provably equal-interval and arguably ratio scale) Stanford-Binet V change-sensitive score (CSS), the top score in the norming group was as far beyond an avarage person as the avarage adult score is beyond a less than three year-old child's. (See "Use of the SB5 in the Assessment of High Abilities" Riverside Publishing Assessment Service Bulletin Number 3 by Deborah Ruf)
My sympathies - I've been there, too.
I recommend Excelsior College- (excelsior.edu). They are cheap, accredited, online and they give credit for a huge number of different tests. The most credit comes from taking the GRE subject exams - if you score in the top 20% you get 30 semester hours of credit - 1 full year, enough to fulfill the requrements of majors that don't requre lab work. They'll also transfer credits from any accredited source and drop any records you don't want.
Also check out hoagiesgifted.org for vast high-quality resources on dealing with the difficulties of being gifted, especially schools' insanity. Reading the TAGFAM, TAGMAX and TAGPDQ mailing lists (esp. the archives of the first two) will make you feel a lot less alone. (Just be sure to sign up for digest mode- high traffic.)
"...the standard deviation is quite often different... "
If it's any reputable IQ test, (other than perhaps the Catell, IIRC) the s.d. is 15. The Stanford-Binet used to use 16, but has not for the last two revisions. The Mensa test used to (any may still) use some large s.d. to make people feel smarter and thus more likely to sign up. But aside from essentially fraudulent types of tests, the s.d. is 15, and thus one can calculate the equivalent percentage, at least for for normal IQs (~65 - ~135).
In reality the normal distribution does not match the ability distribution at the high end. There are more high scorers than one would expect- the distribution is more like log-normal. The reliability/repeatability of high scores is also very low due to ceiling effects, imperfect test correlation, different tests' questions having different sub-factor loadings, and having different degrees of norming quality in the high range. These are the more frequently important reasons one needs to know the tests and the forms before even trying to roughly figure out what a given score means. Sometimes one comes across jumbo deviation size, but I believe most people working with IQ look at such puffed-up numbers almost as fake scores.
~...but on the list of websites for which this entity is culpable, there is one that is a little different, one that sticks out - sticks out its toungue for tasty BBQ bugs, in fact:
[trumpet fanfare]
The Toad Club of America!!!!
From:
So we should be tolerant of other people's support for torture, wars of aggression and the gutting of the Constitution? Bush fascists are entitled to their opinions and their votes, but democracy can in no way make them right, legitimate, or diminish their personal ethical responsibilities for the crimes they have abetted. One need not hate Bush's unwitting dupes, but certainly one cannot respect them; as an American one must hate what they believe and what they are doing to this country. The real, knowing participants in Bush's crimes on the other hand, must not be shown mercy on account of their large numbers, prominent positions or the fact that they subverted the whole US Gaovernment rather than some smaller crime. Insofar as one loves this country or peace or freedom, such knowing participants in Bush's crimes must be hated or despised.
Anyone supporting Bush after the revelations about his war crimes, election fraud and attacks on constitutional and human rights is an enemy of America and the freedoms of Americans. Tangible support of Bush's crimes by an American meets the constitutional definition of treason.
Why do you hate our freedoms?