... But isn't it cool that 10,000 years ago, when angels pushed the planets around the earth, the sun was a glowing ball of rock a few hundred yards wide, and diseases were what you got if you pissed off the local god of leaf-hunting or whatever, people still needed something to challenge their minds when they had spare time. I think this is the greatest thing about the human race - we don't just live in the here and now, we need rules, structure, challenges, mystery, luck to entice us. Perhaps that is what really seperated us from the animal herd, is that we SEEKED out things to challenge us, whereas most animals (and let's get real, most humans, probably including me) would just be happy with lots of food and a nice warm sunny day.
I think games are the highest sign that there is intellegent life here after all.
...condsidering that when the Western world discovered the "new" world, we pretty much trashed (not even intentionally - just being germ carriers) everything native we encountered for the next 200 years. The biggest gaps in our knowledge of Western history tend to be after a "barbarian" invasion, a plauge, flood, a library burning and sacking, etc. - so is it suprising that our knowledge of the history of the Americas is even more sparse?
On the bright side, there may still be other amazing discoveries lurking in the jungles, waiting for us to accidentaly stumble upon. I hope we have the patience and money to keep looking for them - Anthro departments are taking some major financial hits lately.
Well, I don't know what psyc. study it was used in, but it IS used in airline training, as I can personally attest to, along with a few hundred other people who have gone thru Continental's TEM program in the last five years. And it is considered a classic, because it is so effective at illustrating the point to people who have high levels of self-confidence and thus tend to have a "I can take it all on" attitude - traits somewhat common in pilots. This might be a hard concept for you to bend your mind around, but the purpose of studies is to be USED for education and further research, and an airline training program uses material from many sources. We also have film clips from the Discover channel, films from rapid decomp. experiments done by the military in the 50's, hypothermia clips from the AMA, etc.
So thank you for informing me about its origins in a psych study in 1999 - I didn't know that. And I had no idea as to the sex of the person in the gorillia suit. But aside from that little tidbit, you were otherwise an ass - accusing someone of being a liar when you yourself are completely clueless about what is or is not taught in the airlines is pretty Trollish. Or are you also in the industry as well?
In the airlines in the US, the flying duties of the crew are rather strictly divided into the "Flying Pilot" and the "Non-flying Pilot" (FP and NP for short). In essence, the FP is responsible for making sure the airplane is pointed and powered correctly, and the NP is responsible for everything else, INCLUDING RADIO COMMUNICATION. Most airline pilots I have met are quite good at multi-tasking (or they would not be here), but just because you CAN do something, if necessary, doesn't mean you SHOULD. When the consequences of failure involve the wounding/deaths of other people, SOP should be to avoid multi-tasking whenever possible. Unfortunately, people will bitch and moan about the airlines not doing everything in creation to assure their saftey, while driving 30+ in excess of the speed limit while yapping on a phone.
In addition, it has been shown that multi-tasking requires so much focus that extremely vital clues to the bigger picture are missed. There is a classic old film short shown in airline training, where a group of 6 people, 3 dressed in white and 3 dressed in black, are shown, bouncing and tossing two basketballs around. You are told to count the number of times a ball is bounced (not tossed) from one white clothed person to another. The film then starts moving. It is actually a complex task, because not only do you have two balls to watch, you have to carefully note whether it came from and then goes to a white team member. This film goes for about 30 seconds. At the end, every one is asked as to how many ball-bounces between whites they counted. Most of the time, the answers agree within +/-2 out of 10. Occasionally, one person asks, "But what about the gorilla?!?"
You see, the most amazing thing is, that while these 6 people are bouncing balls around, a guy dressed in a gorilla suit walks into the frame, stands in the middle of all the action, WAVES AT THE FRIGGIN' CAMERA, and walks off the other side. ALMOST NOBODY SEES HIM. Everyone is so intent on counting those bouncing balls that they don't see anything else at all. It is hard to belive how you would fall for this, so they replay the film. And there is the gorilla, plain as day. It is meant to show why it is important to carefully divide up responsibilites so that you don't become so focused on task that you miss the waving gorilla... or the approaching mountains, or the depleteing fuel, etc., etc.
Back to cars, if nothing ever went wrong, driving and yapping would not be such a big deal. But a large number of car accidents are based on recognizing a developing situation rapidly, and the biggest thing that goes with multi-tasking is situational awareness. Can you get away with it most of the time? Sure. But 4000 people a month in the US croak in car accidents - more in a year than all the aviation accidents in history combined (plus all terrorist attacks combined as well). So I think people should treat driving as the serious responsibility that it is and STOP YAPPING ON PHONES WHILE DRIVING. If you don't have the maturity level to realize why you should leave a safety margin between the load on and the maximum level of your capabilities when driving a car, you SHOULDN'T BE DRIVING.
Of course, we already HAVE been alerting them from Marconi onwards, as every episode of "I Love Lucy", "Star Trek", "Baywatch" and various reality TV programs has been streaming outwards at the speed of light, not to mention all the porn, Howard Stern, government communications, etc., etc., etc....
Cat's already out of the bag.
Of course, they may see all of that, and decide it's best to stay away or just send a small, asteroid sized rock in our direction to shut off the noise....
Dude, did you even read the TITLE of the article I submitted? You know, "S Korea cloning pioneer disgraced"? Ok, I guess "disgraced" is not EXACTLY the same as "humiliated" - sorry for using a synonym instead of coping the HEADLINE word for word. But did you read some of the quotes?
' "I am very sorry that I have to tell the public words that are too shameful and horrible," he announced publicly. '
' The professor said he was resigning from all public posts, including his chairmanship of the World Stem Cell Hub, which is designed to produce stem cell lines for disease research worldwide. "It is my way of seeking repentance," he said. '
' "I again sincerely apologise for having stirred concern at home and abroad," he said. '
This sounds like he is humbling himself pretty damned publicly to me - which is the definition of humiliation, last I checked. I'll admit, forced was my own assumtion - a man who resigns from the head of the organization he founded, built up, made world-famous, and is proud of, usually doesn't do so unless under extreme duress, so I said, "forced". Great distortion there.
And lastly, (although it was edited out), I submitted the article with a tagline questioning what good was going to be done by getting rid of the PRIME HUMAN CLONING RESEARCHER - prime as in, first, very important, number one, etc. In other words, if I had bias, it was in FAVOR of Dr. Hwang, not to discredit hum.
I can understand worrying about editing bias here sometimes, but jeez, fire at appropriate targets.
It doesn't seem as impressive to brag about a "V8 Engine made entirely out of paper, with the exception of a few parts (motor, wires, etc.)" - that's kinda like saying, "Sushi made entirely out of rice paper, with the execption of a few parts (fish, eel, etc.)"
Actually, if you RTFA, the problem wasn't the DCMA (in this case - I hate the stupid thing), but the interpetation of it in the case ALS Scan v Remarq - as quoted;
"However, in the recent case of ALS Scan, Inc. v. Remarq Communities, Inc., the court found that the copyright owner did not have to point out all of the infringing material, but only substantially all of the material. The relaxation of this specificity requirement shifts the burden of identifying the material to the service provider, raising the question of the extent to which a service provider must search through its system. OSP customers should note that this situation might encourage OSP's to err on the side of removing allegedly infringing material."
The courts that interpet laws are as much of a problem as the Congress that passes them in the first place.
I am slightly surprised that I have not seen a single comment (although I filter out less than 2) about the effect a brilliant or inspiring teacher has had, although I have seen LOTS of comments about, "I was young and brilliant, the system sucked, and then I wound up here rather than where I should have been."
I don't mean to impugn the people with the stories at all - I have a similar one, myself (short version: finished HS math by age 9, became pilot instead of physicist, regrets). But if anything, it should illustrate that being brilliant at a field of knowledge has little to do with self-insight, what makes you happy or having empathy toward others. These are the critical abilites/insights that lead to a worthwhile and satisfying life.
But to the topic - I have found that the greatest leaps I have made in knowledge and/or insight have come from some brilliant teachers who knew just the right trick to lead me just far enough down a path to intrigue me to follow it further on my own. The biggest trick about teaching, I think, is less the spewing of facts, but inspiring/inducing/threatening/cajoling a student to THINK on their own about something - that is where true learning occurs.
Now, how many fellow/.ers want to become teachers, to try and find those brilliant young students and guide them so they don't have the same frustrating experiences so many of us have had?
I sure don't. I have tutored people in math and physics for many years, and the horror stories I hear from both teachers and students in at the H.S. level, coupled with the low pay, lack of respect, and general atmosphere of prison vs. learning make sure I would never, ever want to teach in a High School.
So, perhaps we should talk about how we pay and treat teachers in the U.S. If a high school teacher who was great was paid $150,000 a year (sadly, the same argument even works for University profs), and we assured the class size in High School was only about 15 - 20 so every student got individual attention, and allowed broad latitude in what is to be taught, what do you think would happen to the quality of education? How many more of us would be tempted by a career in teaching? To think of teaching as a PROFESSION and not just something the untalented drift into?
(Of course this would cost a LOT. I personally think it would be worth it.)
I think it's interesting - general relativity makes some very hard to verify but specific predictions. Many competing theories to it over the last 50 years have made predicitions that have, one by one, turned out to be false. Rotational frame dragging is (I think?) one of the last unverified ones. According to Newtonian gravitation & mechanics, the rotation or non-rotation of the earth should not affect an orbiting satellite a whit (ignoring "complications" like variable atmospheric drag based on rotation rate, different shape of earth at different rotation rates, etc.), or put more abstractly, the rotation of an axially symmetric mass distribution should not have anything to do with its gravitational field. General relatitivity does not agree with Newtonian mechanics here, which brings up yet another interesting question:
Is there a difference between rotating reference frames and non-rotating reference frames because of the universe of matter around them, or is it self-generated? In other words, if we "removed" the entire universe except the rotating Earth, would rotation still have meaning? Could we still do an experiment and detect its rotation, or is that an artifact of the universe of matter around it that would vanish when it did? As far as I understand general relativity (and IANAP), it does not make a hypothesis one way or the other. Is the question meta-physical? Or is there some clever way to set up an experiment to actually tell?
Actually, it doesn't have to do with universal reference frames in the sense you mean. In Newtonian mechanics, there is a limited set of preferred reference frames within which Newtonian physics is valid - the inertial reference frames, or, casually speaking, the ones moving at a constant velocity - none of which is a "Universal" or better reference frame than any other. But even in Einstein's model, which incorporates accelerated reference frames in the same framework as inertial, there are still "preferred" reference frames; non-rotating ones. ROTATING reference frames lead to unambigious differences, both in Newtonian and Einsteinian models. While sloppily written, the article means that it is the ROTATION of the Earth's reference frame that leads to different predicted results, not the TRANSLATIONAL motion. Not all reference frames are created equal.
You wrote an interesting thesis on what makes a geek. But I take issue with a good bit of what you said; you illustrated some other qualities that pop up in "geeks" from time to time that earns them/(us?) a lot of ridicule.
For instance, at the very end of your essay, you said, [implicitly defining a geek], "...But the one thing that separates them from the rest is that they actually prefer to take the harder route if they feel the end result is worth it when it comes to learning something complex. And that, my friends, is a geek." Fine. But human and social interaction is one of the MOST COMPLEX fields of knowledge in existence. The fact that the science of psychology is so primitive is an indication of how poor our understanding of it is. So why don't geeks tend to gravitate toward the social sciences, ones that are in great need of improvement? I think the answer is because you miss capturing other aspects of geekdom (I can't believe I'm writing seriously about this) - the specific interest in MACHINES and LOGICAL SYSTEMS instead of PEOPLE and SOCIAL SYSTEMS.
Other things that some geeks display is a generosity with knowledge - they love the thing they geek over, and wish to share it, usually for free, with others. This outward generosity leaves them vulnerable in many social systems, because those who are more mysterious and vauge about what they know usually have better control and power in social interactions; and it is frustrating watching BSers succeed with little real knowledge, a situation a geek is frequently in.
Another characteristic is superiority - for instance, your exclusionary-style definition of geekdom to exclude those without the spare time, money or luck to build electronic equipment. Where I grew up, we had "car geeks" - otherwise known as motorheads. They are usually looked down upon by computer people, but in their ability, interest, and time spent on tweaking every last bit of performance out of cars of all makes, models and stripes, fixing, maintaining, and almost building from scratch just about every part that makes up a car, they are the equal of any computer or electrical geek I have met. But sadly, of course, they tend to look down on computer geeks as much as computer geeks look down on them. And like all generalizations, there are welcome exceptions.
Anyway, to summarize, I find that the two essential qualities that make a geek are 1) A love of mechanistic systems instead of social ones, and 2) The enjoyment of sharing that knowledge and learning more that comes before money, power, status, and other more typical goals in life.
And since all of this is strictly my opinion, it probably should be taken pretty unseriously!
Indeed - hey, here is a book I think you would really appreciate. It has LOTS of equations (which I don't think will bug you, hence my recommendation), but a theme and a thread that makes the book a wonderful, beautiful tour through many areas of mathematics:
No stupid "recommend and gets points" or any such stuff - it took me several months to read through the whole book, and I then reread the whole book again, it is so delightful. Perhaps you will like it - it is hard to find excellent books written for "mathematical hobbyists" - people who love and enjoy math, but are not professional mathematicians but are nonetheless quite capable of doing an integral, fiddling with a bit of DE, etc.
This is the kind of book I wish/. would review. Think there would be any luck in submitting this one for review? It's over a year old, and I've never attempted the submission process before...
"The quadratic formula is derived by an algebraic process which involves completing the square."
Yes, and the derivation of the quadratic equation is the solving of it - using algebraic manipulations to replace the original equation with one in the form, x=...(stuff with no x's or f(x)'s in it). The point I'm trying to make is that just knowing the quadratic equation gives you no insight as to how it was derived, nor does it give you insights as to how to solve other equations (say, cubics).
"And isn't a solution the result of "solving" an equation? I think the quadratic formula does this quite nicely."
The converse is not necessarily so - for instance, I could fairly easily come up with a 200 digit number, and say, "factor it". After you struggle with it for a while, I then could present you with the "solution" - two 100 digit primes, which you could easily verify multiply to check if I am right or not. But just because you have a SOLUTION, that does not give you any insight into the process of SOLVING (i.e. did I really just factor (how?) a 200-digit number or did I generate it from the answers in the first place?). If I was to tweak a quadratic equation slightly, say ask you to solve, (ax+b)*(cx+d)=e, the quadratic formula would be useless to you unless you had other knowledge of algebra. Ultimately, the quadratic formula is a limited result of much more general algebraic techniques, all of which ultimately derive themselves from the real number axioms.
If you just want solutions without knowledge of how they come up, you probably wouldn't be interested in this book anyway....
"...mathematics, in general, cannot be dumbed down simplified for laypeople the same way that other natural sciences can. Someone can have a general idea of what a black hole is even when they don't understand the physical theories behind it, but how do you explain to a layperson what a Hilbert space is?"
And isn't that one of the greatest things about it?
Actually, a large amount of mathematics can be "dumbed down", or, in perhaps more tolerant language, "patiently explained repeatedly and a variety of different ways" so that people can grasp the idea. In doing so, though, you are replacing the authority of mathematics with the authority of the explainer - one of the beautiful things about a proof is that when you understand it, you don't have to take anyone else's word as to whether it is true or not - it IS. But when you skip the technical details (and in doing so, the REASON for the technical details - they help to shape and refine mathematical ideas further), the reason someone believes a proof is that they trust YOU, not the math.
Perhaps in a way it's nice there is a substiantial barrier to entry - look at what happens at places where there is not. Look, even here at/. , at the limited number of posts on a math topic. Math even wards many geeks away.
Oh, be charitable; one of those two dashes in front of the "x=" was meant as a negative! But on the other hand, the quadratic formula is not used to "solve" an equation any more than looking up the answer to a puzzle in the back of the book is solving it. For that, you need to "complete the square" or know/come up with other factoring tricks.
To kill DRM, make Joe Consumer Mad...
on
Bad Day To Be Sony
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
About the only way DRM will be tamed (I think, in the long run, it will be eliminated completely, but that will take people completely rethinking intellectual "property" as a lega concept) is if it intereferes or damages an average person's system. That is perhaps the biggest "problem" with DRM - its many failure modes usually screw you out of your content - or in this case, screw up your system. And it's a great, wonderful problem, because all we need are a few more screw-ups like this, and average people will start to associate "DRM" with "Sucks/Breaks" and avoid it like the plauge.
What you say is absolutely true; if an event has a non-zero probability of occuring in a given time frame, take enough frames and the probability rises arbitrarily close to 1. So, the key is to come up with some reasonable estimates of the probabilities - this way rational choices can be made once the consequences are taken into account. What makes this news disturbing is that we have much better ideas as to the possible mutation rates of virii than we did even 10 years ago, much of it coming out of our research into HIV, a fairly rapidly mutating virus (should be plural - there are dozens of strains now). It depends of the size/mixing of the breeding population, lethality rate, as well as virus specific characteristics, etc. Many of these factors have grown worse (in terms of the ability to support a high mutation rate) in the 20th century; much larger areas of high population densities (both human and avian), greater absolute number of people exposed to avian populations as the number of meat-eaters has increased, etc.
The point is, we have already had a few flu pandemics this century. We really don't have an effective vaccine (in either quality or quantity) for most flu strains presently existant. The conditions that would tend to generate a lethal and human-contagious flu are out there. And we live in a very mobile world.... So, as a reasonable estimate, a pandemic 2 times every 100 years is probably close.
Now, if there is a 2 in 100 chance every year of a pandemic that would kill millions, it does seem like it merits our attention. I think 2 in 100 a year was the estimated probability that a cat 4 or 5 hurricane would hit New Orleans.
...and what interesting Sony software do you have to install to use one of these? Does it uninstall as well as their little rootkit that comes with their music CD's? I wouldn't touch a Sony product with a ten foot pole right now.
Slashdot Mirror
DOH!!!! Ok, I plead guilty of typing on slashdot after a really good bottle of Amarone and passing a checkride - forgive me for my grammatical sin! ;)
... But isn't it cool that 10,000 years ago, when angels pushed the planets around the earth, the sun was a glowing ball of rock a few hundred yards wide, and diseases were what you got if you pissed off the local god of leaf-hunting or whatever, people still needed something to challenge their minds when they had spare time. I think this is the greatest thing about the human race - we don't just live in the here and now, we need rules, structure, challenges, mystery, luck to entice us. Perhaps that is what really seperated us from the animal herd, is that we SEEKED out things to challenge us, whereas most animals (and let's get real, most humans, probably including me) would just be happy with lots of food and a nice warm sunny day.
I think games are the highest sign that there is intellegent life here after all.
...condsidering that when the Western world discovered the "new" world, we pretty much trashed (not even intentionally - just being germ carriers) everything native we encountered for the next 200 years. The biggest gaps in our knowledge of Western history tend to be after a "barbarian" invasion, a plauge, flood, a library burning and sacking, etc. - so is it suprising that our knowledge of the history of the Americas is even more sparse?
On the bright side, there may still be other amazing discoveries lurking in the jungles, waiting for us to accidentaly stumble upon. I hope we have the patience and money to keep looking for them - Anthro departments are taking some major financial hits lately.
Well, I don't know what psyc. study it was used in, but it IS used in airline training, as I can personally attest to, along with a few hundred other people who have gone thru Continental's TEM program in the last five years. And it is considered a classic, because it is so effective at illustrating the point to people who have high levels of self-confidence and thus tend to have a "I can take it all on" attitude - traits somewhat common in pilots. This might be a hard concept for you to bend your mind around, but the purpose of studies is to be USED for education and further research, and an airline training program uses material from many sources. We also have film clips from the Discover channel, films from rapid decomp. experiments done by the military in the 50's, hypothermia clips from the AMA, etc.
So thank you for informing me about its origins in a psych study in 1999 - I didn't know that. And I had no idea as to the sex of the person in the gorillia suit. But aside from that little tidbit, you were otherwise an ass - accusing someone of being a liar when you yourself are completely clueless about what is or is not taught in the airlines is pretty Trollish. Or are you also in the industry as well?
In the airlines in the US, the flying duties of the crew are rather strictly divided into the "Flying Pilot" and the "Non-flying Pilot" (FP and NP for short). In essence, the FP is responsible for making sure the airplane is pointed and powered correctly, and the NP is responsible for everything else, INCLUDING RADIO COMMUNICATION. Most airline pilots I have met are quite good at multi-tasking (or they would not be here), but just because you CAN do something, if necessary, doesn't mean you SHOULD. When the consequences of failure involve the wounding/deaths of other people, SOP should be to avoid multi-tasking whenever possible. Unfortunately, people will bitch and moan about the airlines not doing everything in creation to assure their saftey, while driving 30+ in excess of the speed limit while yapping on a phone.
In addition, it has been shown that multi-tasking requires so much focus that extremely vital clues to the bigger picture are missed. There is a classic old film short shown in airline training, where a group of 6 people, 3 dressed in white and 3 dressed in black, are shown, bouncing and tossing two basketballs around. You are told to count the number of times a ball is bounced (not tossed) from one white clothed person to another. The film then starts moving. It is actually a complex task, because not only do you have two balls to watch, you have to carefully note whether it came from and then goes to a white team member. This film goes for about 30 seconds. At the end, every one is asked as to how many ball-bounces between whites they counted. Most of the time, the answers agree within +/-2 out of 10. Occasionally, one person asks, "But what about the gorilla?!?"
You see, the most amazing thing is, that while these 6 people are bouncing balls around, a guy dressed in a gorilla suit walks into the frame, stands in the middle of all the action, WAVES AT THE FRIGGIN' CAMERA, and walks off the other side. ALMOST NOBODY SEES HIM. Everyone is so intent on counting those bouncing balls that they don't see anything else at all. It is hard to belive how you would fall for this, so they replay the film. And there is the gorilla, plain as day. It is meant to show why it is important to carefully divide up responsibilites so that you don't become so focused on task that you miss the waving gorilla... or the approaching mountains, or the depleteing fuel, etc., etc.
Back to cars, if nothing ever went wrong, driving and yapping would not be such a big deal. But a large number of car accidents are based on recognizing a developing situation rapidly, and the biggest thing that goes with multi-tasking is situational awareness. Can you get away with it most of the time? Sure. But 4000 people a month in the US croak in car accidents - more in a year than all the aviation accidents in history combined (plus all terrorist attacks combined as well). So I think people should treat driving as the serious responsibility that it is and STOP YAPPING ON PHONES WHILE DRIVING. If you don't have the maturity level to realize why you should leave a safety margin between the load on and the maximum level of your capabilities when driving a car, you SHOULDN'T BE DRIVING.
Of course, we already HAVE been alerting them from Marconi onwards, as every episode of "I Love Lucy", "Star Trek", "Baywatch" and various reality TV programs has been streaming outwards at the speed of light, not to mention all the porn, Howard Stern, government communications, etc., etc., etc....
Cat's already out of the bag.
Of course, they may see all of that, and decide it's best to stay away or just send a small, asteroid sized rock in our direction to shut off the noise....
Where do you think Windows came from?
[ducks]
Dude, did you even read the TITLE of the article I submitted? You know, "S Korea cloning pioneer disgraced"? Ok, I guess "disgraced" is not EXACTLY the same as "humiliated" - sorry for using a synonym instead of coping the HEADLINE word for word. But did you read some of the quotes?
' "I am very sorry that I have to tell the public words that are too shameful and horrible," he announced publicly. '
' The professor said he was resigning from all public posts, including his chairmanship of the World Stem Cell Hub, which is designed to produce stem cell lines for disease research worldwide. "It is my way of seeking repentance," he said. '
' "I again sincerely apologise for having stirred concern at home and abroad," he said. '
This sounds like he is humbling himself pretty damned publicly to me - which is the definition of humiliation, last I checked. I'll admit, forced was my own assumtion - a man who resigns from the head of the organization he founded, built up, made world-famous, and is proud of, usually doesn't do so unless under extreme duress, so I said, "forced". Great distortion there.
And lastly, (although it was edited out), I submitted the article with a tagline questioning what good was going to be done by getting rid of the PRIME HUMAN CLONING RESEARCHER - prime as in, first, very important, number one, etc. In other words, if I had bias, it was in FAVOR of Dr. Hwang, not to discredit hum.
I can understand worrying about editing bias here sometimes, but jeez, fire at appropriate targets.
It doesn't seem as impressive to brag about a "V8 Engine made entirely out of paper, with the exception of a few parts (motor, wires, etc.)" - that's kinda like saying, "Sushi made entirely out of rice paper, with the execption of a few parts (fish, eel, etc.)"
But it IS a cool looking model!
Actually, if you RTFA, the problem wasn't the DCMA (in this case - I hate the stupid thing), but the interpetation of it in the case ALS Scan v Remarq - as quoted;
"However, in the recent case of ALS Scan, Inc. v. Remarq Communities, Inc., the court found that the copyright owner did not have to point out all of the infringing material, but only substantially all of the material. The relaxation of this specificity requirement shifts the burden of identifying the material to the service provider, raising the question of the extent to which a service provider must search through its system. OSP customers should note that this situation might encourage OSP's to err on the side of removing allegedly infringing material."
The courts that interpet laws are as much of a problem as the Congress that passes them in the first place.
I am slightly surprised that I have not seen a single comment (although I filter out less than 2) about the effect a brilliant or inspiring teacher has had, although I have seen LOTS of comments about, "I was young and brilliant, the system sucked, and then I wound up here rather than where I should have been."
/.ers want to become teachers, to try and find those brilliant young students and guide them so they don't have the same frustrating experiences so many of us have had?
I don't mean to impugn the people with the stories at all - I have a similar one, myself (short version: finished HS math by age 9, became pilot instead of physicist, regrets). But if anything, it should illustrate that being brilliant at a field of knowledge has little to do with self-insight, what makes you happy or having empathy toward others. These are the critical abilites/insights that lead to a worthwhile and satisfying life.
But to the topic - I have found that the greatest leaps I have made in knowledge and/or insight have come from some brilliant teachers who knew just the right trick to lead me just far enough down a path to intrigue me to follow it further on my own. The biggest trick about teaching, I think, is less the spewing of facts, but inspiring/inducing/threatening/cajoling a student to THINK on their own about something - that is where true learning occurs.
Now, how many fellow
I sure don't. I have tutored people in math and physics for many years, and the horror stories I hear from both teachers and students in at the H.S. level, coupled with the low pay, lack of respect, and general atmosphere of prison vs. learning make sure I would never, ever want to teach in a High School.
So, perhaps we should talk about how we pay and treat teachers in the U.S. If a high school teacher who was great was paid $150,000 a year (sadly, the same argument even works for University profs), and we assured the class size in High School was only about 15 - 20 so every student got individual attention, and allowed broad latitude in what is to be taught, what do you think would happen to the quality of education? How many more of us would be tempted by a career in teaching? To think of teaching as a PROFESSION and not just something the untalented drift into?
(Of course this would cost a LOT. I personally think it would be worth it.)
Same comment. Only meant (+1) insightfully.
On the other hand, they [SONY] aren't that bright. Never mind...
I think it's interesting - general relativity makes some very hard to verify but specific predictions. Many competing theories to it over the last 50 years have made predicitions that have, one by one, turned out to be false. Rotational frame dragging is (I think?) one of the last unverified ones. According to Newtonian gravitation & mechanics, the rotation or non-rotation of the earth should not affect an orbiting satellite a whit (ignoring "complications" like variable atmospheric drag based on rotation rate, different shape of earth at different rotation rates, etc.), or put more abstractly, the rotation of an axially symmetric mass distribution should not have anything to do with its gravitational field. General relatitivity does not agree with Newtonian mechanics here, which brings up yet another interesting question:
Is there a difference between rotating reference frames and non-rotating reference frames because of the universe of matter around them, or is it self-generated? In other words, if we "removed" the entire universe except the rotating Earth, would rotation still have meaning? Could we still do an experiment and detect its rotation, or is that an artifact of the universe of matter around it that would vanish when it did? As far as I understand general relativity (and IANAP), it does not make a hypothesis one way or the other. Is the question meta-physical? Or is there some clever way to set up an experiment to actually tell?
Sigh - sometimes, I wish I was a physicist!
Actually, it doesn't have to do with universal reference frames in the sense you mean. In Newtonian mechanics, there is a limited set of preferred reference frames within which Newtonian physics is valid - the inertial reference frames, or, casually speaking, the ones moving at a constant velocity - none of which is a "Universal" or better reference frame than any other. But even in Einstein's model, which incorporates accelerated reference frames in the same framework as inertial, there are still "preferred" reference frames; non-rotating ones. ROTATING reference frames lead to unambigious differences, both in Newtonian and Einsteinian models. While sloppily written, the article means that it is the ROTATION of the Earth's reference frame that leads to different predicted results, not the TRANSLATIONAL motion. Not all reference frames are created equal.
You wrote an interesting thesis on what makes a geek. But I take issue with a good bit of what you said; you illustrated some other qualities that pop up in "geeks" from time to time that earns them/(us?) a lot of ridicule.
For instance, at the very end of your essay, you said, [implicitly defining a geek], "...But the one thing that separates them from the rest is that they actually prefer to take the harder route if they feel the end result is worth it when it comes to learning something complex. And that, my friends, is a geek." Fine. But human and social interaction is one of the MOST COMPLEX fields of knowledge in existence. The fact that the science of psychology is so primitive is an indication of how poor our understanding of it is. So why don't geeks tend to gravitate toward the social sciences, ones that are in great need of improvement? I think the answer is because you miss capturing other aspects of geekdom (I can't believe I'm writing seriously about this) - the specific interest in MACHINES and LOGICAL SYSTEMS instead of PEOPLE and SOCIAL SYSTEMS.
Other things that some geeks display is a generosity with knowledge - they love the thing they geek over, and wish to share it, usually for free, with others. This outward generosity leaves them vulnerable in many social systems, because those who are more mysterious and vauge about what they know usually have better control and power in social interactions; and it is frustrating watching BSers succeed with little real knowledge, a situation a geek is frequently in.
Another characteristic is superiority - for instance, your exclusionary-style definition of geekdom to exclude those without the spare time, money or luck to build electronic equipment. Where I grew up, we had "car geeks" - otherwise known as motorheads. They are usually looked down upon by computer people, but in their ability, interest, and time spent on tweaking every last bit of performance out of cars of all makes, models and stripes, fixing, maintaining, and almost building from scratch just about every part that makes up a car, they are the equal of any computer or electrical geek I have met. But sadly, of course, they tend to look down on computer geeks as much as computer geeks look down on them. And like all generalizations, there are welcome exceptions.
Anyway, to summarize, I find that the two essential qualities that make a geek are 1) A love of mechanistic systems instead of social ones, and 2) The enjoyment of sharing that knowledge and learning more that comes before money, power, status, and other more typical goals in life.
And since all of this is strictly my opinion, it probably should be taken pretty unseriously!
Cheers,
Indeed - hey, here is a book I think you would really appreciate. It has LOTS of equations (which I don't think will bug you, hence my recommendation), but a theme and a thread that makes the book a wonderful, beautiful tour through many areas of mathematics:
7 98844-8308625?v=glance&n=283155&n=507846&s=books&v =glance
/. would review. Think there would be any luck in submitting this one for review? It's over a year old, and I've never attempted the submission process before...
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0691099839/103-7
No stupid "recommend and gets points" or any such stuff - it took me several months to read through the whole book, and I then reread the whole book again, it is so delightful. Perhaps you will like it - it is hard to find excellent books written for "mathematical hobbyists" - people who love and enjoy math, but are not professional mathematicians but are nonetheless quite capable of doing an integral, fiddling with a bit of DE, etc.
This is the kind of book I wish
"The quadratic formula is derived by an algebraic process which involves completing the square."
...(stuff with no x's or f(x)'s in it). The point I'm trying to make is that just knowing the quadratic equation gives you no insight as to how it was derived, nor does it give you insights as to how to solve other equations (say, cubics).
Yes, and the derivation of the quadratic equation is the solving of it - using algebraic manipulations to replace the original equation with one in the form, x=
"And isn't a solution the result of "solving" an equation? I think the quadratic formula does this quite nicely."
The converse is not necessarily so - for instance, I could fairly easily come up with a 200 digit number, and say, "factor it". After you struggle with it for a while, I then could present you with the "solution" - two 100 digit primes, which you could easily verify multiply to check if I am right or not. But just because you have a SOLUTION, that does not give you any insight into the process of SOLVING (i.e. did I really just factor (how?) a 200-digit number or did I generate it from the answers in the first place?). If I was to tweak a quadratic equation slightly, say ask you to solve, (ax+b)*(cx+d)=e, the quadratic formula would be useless to you unless you had other knowledge of algebra. Ultimately, the quadratic formula is a limited result of much more general algebraic techniques, all of which ultimately derive themselves from the real number axioms.
If you just want solutions without knowledge of how they come up, you probably wouldn't be interested in this book anyway....
"...mathematics, in general, cannot be dumbed down simplified for laypeople the same way that other natural sciences can. Someone can have a general idea of what a black hole is even when they don't understand the physical theories behind it, but how do you explain to a layperson what a Hilbert space is?"
/. , at the limited number of posts on a math topic. Math even wards many geeks away.
And isn't that one of the greatest things about it?
Actually, a large amount of mathematics can be "dumbed down", or, in perhaps more tolerant language, "patiently explained repeatedly and a variety of different ways" so that people can grasp the idea. In doing so, though, you are replacing the authority of mathematics with the authority of the explainer - one of the beautiful things about a proof is that when you understand it, you don't have to take anyone else's word as to whether it is true or not - it IS. But when you skip the technical details (and in doing so, the REASON for the technical details - they help to shape and refine mathematical ideas further), the reason someone believes a proof is that they trust YOU, not the math.
Perhaps in a way it's nice there is a substiantial barrier to entry - look at what happens at places where there is not. Look, even here at
Oh, be charitable; one of those two dashes in front of the "x=" was meant as a negative! But on the other hand, the quadratic formula is not used to "solve" an equation any more than looking up the answer to a puzzle in the back of the book is solving it. For that, you need to "complete the square" or know/come up with other factoring tricks.
Standard. (Unfortunately)
About the only way DRM will be tamed (I think, in the long run, it will be eliminated completely, but that will take people completely rethinking intellectual "property" as a lega concept) is if it intereferes or damages an average person's system. That is perhaps the biggest "problem" with DRM - its many failure modes usually screw you out of your content - or in this case, screw up your system. And it's a great, wonderful problem, because all we need are a few more screw-ups like this, and average people will start to associate "DRM" with "Sucks/Breaks" and avoid it like the plauge.
Go Sony! Do it again!
...and several posters seem to know more from other news sources than the BBC. Care to post some links? Thx!
What you say is absolutely true; if an event has a non-zero probability of occuring in a given time frame, take enough frames and the probability rises arbitrarily close to 1. So, the key is to come up with some reasonable estimates of the probabilities - this way rational choices can be made once the consequences are taken into account. What makes this news disturbing is that we have much better ideas as to the possible mutation rates of virii than we did even 10 years ago, much of it coming out of our research into HIV, a fairly rapidly mutating virus (should be plural - there are dozens of strains now). It depends of the size/mixing of the breeding population, lethality rate, as well as virus specific characteristics, etc. Many of these factors have grown worse (in terms of the ability to support a high mutation rate) in the 20th century; much larger areas of high population densities (both human and avian), greater absolute number of people exposed to avian populations as the number of meat-eaters has increased, etc.
The point is, we have already had a few flu pandemics this century. We really don't have an effective vaccine (in either quality or quantity) for most flu strains presently existant. The conditions that would tend to generate a lethal and human-contagious flu are out there. And we live in a very mobile world.... So, as a reasonable estimate, a pandemic 2 times every 100 years is probably close.
Now, if there is a 2 in 100 chance every year of a pandemic that would kill millions, it does seem like it merits our attention. I think 2 in 100 a year was the estimated probability that a cat 4 or 5 hurricane would hit New Orleans.
Just my 2 cents - and IANA Microbiologist
...and what interesting Sony software do you have to install to use one of these? Does it uninstall as well as their little rootkit that comes with their music CD's? I wouldn't touch a Sony product with a ten foot pole right now.
"I HOPE you brought enough for everybody!!"
"I didn't know there wuz gonna be so many!"
=BANG= -THUMP-
"Boy, is he strict!"
(Sorry, couldn't resist - with apologies to M.B. & Co.)